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“... On 29 January 1884 Henry James noted a story which he had heard from Gertrude Tennant. It struck him ‘as a dramatic and pretty subject’. Young Lord Stafford, it seemed, was in love with Lady Grosvenor, whom he had known before her marriage, but had now no expectation of being able to marry as her husband was alive and robust ...”

“... the captive, testifying, as With great power the apostles gave witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus (Acts 4.33). I was also interested in restoring sight to the blind (Luke 4.19), casting out demons (Luke 9.1), cleansing lepers (Matthew 8.1-4), feeding thousands (Luke 9.10-17) and raising the dead (John 11.1-43), but I never quite managed any of ...”

“... MiG. In his introduction to a revised 1997 edition of the novel, he concluded: It was said of Lord Byron that he was more proud of his Norman ancestors who had accompanied William the Conqueror in the invasion of England than of having written famed works. The name de Burun, not yet Anglicised, was inscribed in the Domesday book. Looking back, I feel a ...”

“... Cecil, First Baron Burghley, served Elizabeth I for nearly forty years, as principal secretary and lord treasurer, and left an enormous body of papers. His correspondence, now dispersed in four major and a number of minor collections, dominates the political history of Elizabeth’s reign. Even more important, in some respects, are the unique series of ...”

“... leading the reader into a brief appreciation of the way Biblical poetry works, according to James Kugel’s theory about the sharpening or intensifying nature of Biblical parallelism. It shows, too, how consistently in the David story style and politics go hand in hand: It is a fixed rule in Biblical poetry that when a number occurs in the first ...”

“... christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and ...”

“... awakening dates from the production of Ossian,’ Ezra Pound wrote, and he was right. One of James Macpherson’s great contributions to literature was the use of the fragment. His first Ossianic work, the Fragments of Ancient Poetry, published in Edinburgh in 1760, uses in its title and as its form one of the familiar terms of classical scholarship ...”

“... way the world thinks about economic problems’? The first set of issues is addressed by Harold James in his impressive study, The German Slump. In explaining an apparent economic recovery under the Nazis, following the bankruptcy of the Weimar regime, there is a plausible argument that ‘the right blocked Keynesianism, and were only prepared to accept ...”

“... constantly enriched by marriages to people of interesting and, as it turned out, dominant blood. James V of Scotland, for example – now there was a Tudor, if anyone can be said to justify the epithet. The grandson of Henry VII, the nephew of Henry VIII (his mother was the Tudor Princess Margaret), he began his personal rule by polishing off the enemies of ...”

“... stay in Italy. Then after Christmas I read Gabriele Annan’s review in the LRB (7 January) of James Fox’s The Langhorne Sisters – Nancy had been the middle one of the five – and began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still ...”

“... News International over the past year have given us many memorable moments, but Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons last July is first among them. While James cut a predictably bitter figure, his octogenarian father could hardly have seemed ...”

“... and one had to catch up with a celebrity that everyone else had already divined: Fiennes, Bingham (Lord Lucan’s son), Vestey, Wellesley, Sainsbury. There were copious numbers of double-barrelled names: Fearnley-Whittingstall, Austen-Leigh, Scrase-Dickins, the delicious Money-Coutts. (Money Counts?) There was even a triple-barrelled name: Edward ...”

“... and one of the finest surviving examples of the mature designs of Robert Adam. Two years later, Lord Iveagh died, bequeathing Kenwood to the nation, along with 63 Old Master and 18th-century British paintings from his own collection, including works by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough and Reynolds, as an example of the house, and artistic holdings, of an ...”

“... to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely got away from ...”

“... of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.’ Thus Henry James in the Preface to The Aspern Papers, the germ of which was the story of an American Shelley-worshipper seeking out the eighty-year old Claire Clairmont to trick or wheedle her into handing over precious documents illuminating her youthful relations with ...”