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“... kind, and keeping the maximum number of plates spinning with flicks of punctuation. It would do Henry James’s vision more violence to translate his books into an English deprived of intermediate stops than to render them in a comma-rich Esperanto. The novels of Proust and Mann would lose much of their intellectual flavour if commas were ...”

“... Most of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at ...”

“... Among its officers and members were Tennyson, Gladstone, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, William James, Henri Bergson, and scores of other persons with unimpeachable intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by deism, had been shored up for some time by the physico-theology of Bishop ...”

“... so little because he was a fool’; moreover, he was cruel to choirboys and horses. Henry Carrington, a dilettante, failed to take on the Dissenters, resorted to wintering in Italy, leaving curates chosen for their cheapness (‘One was a pederast, another was a lunatic, a third was an alcoholic’), and became the oldest beneficed clergyman in ...”

“... The book has its international theme (with Jacobson’s native South Africa substituted for Henry James’s America), and it raises Jamesian uncertainties about who, in the end, is the victim of whom, and about where guilt truly lies. Hidden in the Heart isn’t a book for those who don’t believe in coups de foudre, or who think that once the ...”

“... control, from one age to another, often in the wrong order. I cross the Forth Bridge, bound from James Thin’s bookshop in Edinburgh to Waterstone’s in Aberdeen, remembering one of many student treks from Aberdeen to Cambridge. The train paused, shuddering, early on a January morning. The dark-red cantilevers sloped upward, huge as mountain summits, into ...”

“... call him Kingsley – some thing to do with Charles of that name, we conjecture, or perhaps it was Henry, C’s black-sheep brother, a figure whose curriculum vitae reads very like some of those that Amis has in store for us: pissed all the time, terrific sponger, no good at writing novels, and so on.) We are, however, vouchsafed a glimpse or two of Amis’s ...”

“... and Hawksmoor’. Invoking those artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and ...”

“... became ex officio head of the Church of England. On any view this was going to be a problem, and James II as he now was, egged on by his theological advisers, made the worst of it. Among other unwise moves he declared the Test Acts, which barred Catholics and dissenters from public office, to be of no effect, allowing him to commission Catholics as army ...”

“... those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe … had in some form and by some definition ...”

“... parish of Ennismolach, as his father was before him. Named for the great Protestant patriot Henry Grattan, the orator and constitutionalist of the Anglo-Irish Parliament of 1782-1800, Fitzmaurice upholds a tradition both proudly Protestant and definitely Irish. Yet his parish has dwindled almost to nothing in the decades since Independence. ‘You ...”

“... Master George’s ‘progress in learning I can scarcely say too little’. His father, George Henry Moore, a successful racehorse owner and politician, was convinced his eldest son was a dunce and took the time-honoured step of attempting to browbeat him into an Army career. Moore junior balked at the discipline of military training college and was ...”

“... murders Jos Sedley in the final chapter of Vanity Fair, but her guilt is strongly implied. Is Henry James’s nameless governess in The Turn of the Screw a heroic and blameless victim of evil, or a deranged child-killer? In denying us certainty, James trades on the ambiguities inherent in her profession. Sheridan ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... of the evening told me the following story. In 1945 he had been engaged as a book reviewer for Henry Luce’ Time magazine. Or he thought he had been so engaged. When he turned up for work, he was informed that Whittaker Chambers, chief Pooh-Bah of the ‘back of the book’, wished to see him. He entered the sanctum and found the stout, surly presence ...”