“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... statute this was, had little interest in overseas solutions to economic problems; her successor, James VI and I, was more amenable, as long as it didn’t cost him anything. The foundation of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607 fed unrealistic dreams of improving England’s balance of payments by settling lands where commodities such as minerals, furs and timber ...”

“... Midwich Cuckoos adaptation Village of the Damned; the BBC’s Dead of Night series and its M.R. James Christmas ghost stories; Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital. In a way, Young is writing a new history of British film and television, an alternative to the more respectable version that has tended to focus on Loach and Leigh, Powell ...”

“... sorts: the rag-and-bone shop and the rag-and-bone picker were Victorian commonplaces. The earnest Henry Mayhew wrote that ‘the state of the shoes of the rag-and-bone picker is a very important matter to him’; Mrs Gaskell placed ‘rag-and-bone warehouses’ next to those other urban emporia of recycling, pawn-brokers’ shops; and almost sixty years ...”

“... pages of a book. All his life he was desperately concerned about appearances. He fired the poet James Thomson from the paper he edited for drunkenness (‘The City of Dreadful Night’ first appeared in Bradlaugh’s National Reformer). And though he was more or less in love with his long-time collaborator Annie Besant (and she desperately so with ...”

“... 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 ...”