“... Stated baldly, the plot of the novel – The Moth, The Darter, The Darter’s enthusiasm for Henry James, Agnes’s love-talk full of poetry, the near kidnapping, the archive, the effortless class slippages – strains credulity. Indeed it bursts credulity at the seams. Of course in a romance it doesn’t strictly matter what’s believable in real-world ...”

“... talented young women, which included Ida Nettleship, Ursula Tyrwhitt, Edna Waugh and Gwen Salmond. Henry Tonks, the anatomist and ex-doctor, and Wilson Steer were their teachers, and Whistler was their hero. In 1898 she went to Paris with Ida Nettleship and Gwen Salmond and the three of them enrolled as students at Whistler’s newly opened school, the ...”

“... by 1310. Rhodes was their happy place. It was there that they grew into a prosperous local naval power with a small fleet of galleys. Unfortunately, Rhodes is only twenty kilometres from the Anatolian coast and the knights became such a nuisance to Muslim pilgrims and merchants that the young Süleyman, not yet the Magnificent, moved them on again in 1523 ...”

“... her novel Mrs Caliban Rachel Ingalls displayed both unusual anthropomorphism and unusual narrative power. Both these attributes are in evidence once again in Binstead’s Safari, which transforms the story of a tired marriage – that of the Binsteads – and an expedition stoically or indifferently taken together – their safari – into a parable which has ...”

“... about it. But practically (and this is his first-rate triumph) we don’t think much about it. Henry James is not the first writer to have been impressed yet baffled by Pierre Loti. Anatole France, who called him the ‘sublime illiterate’, believed that, of all their contemporaries, he was ‘the most sure to last’. To his peers Loti was a distinct ...”

“... from the densely populated, fiercely individualistic Yiddish culture of which Anzia Yezierska and Henry Roth wrote in die Twenties and Thirties in such novels as Bread Givers and Call It Sleep respectively; this vanished world of ‘heroic’ elders Paley explores only by way of her father, who appears in her short fiction as an elderly gentleman of ...”

“... Tim feels responsible. The disaster has particularly disturbing effects on Lucy, who has a strange power to infect other children with her detachment and her death-defying urges. More signs and wonders: children fly, they scale lunatic heights, they leap off cliffs. A severed head, another head gored by pigs, untameable orphaned children; these are weighty ...”

“... Trench, then only 36, was appointed headmaster of Bradfield. His new position gave him even more power to indulge what Peel calls his ‘foibles’. He won universal praise as a headmaster who continued to teach, but he carefully picked classes of 14-year-olds whom he could invite to his study for extra-curricular supervision. After reading this book, I ...”

“... correspondence. It is hardly surprising that another of her husband’s young friends, the painter Henry Wallis, must have seemed to offer to Mary the possibility of a simpler and more chivalrous devotion. In painting her husband as the doomed Chatterton, gracefully draped in his purple breeches against the background of a Bristol dawn, Wallis might seem to ...”

“... all in emancipation from the cramped confines of the self. Beauty as well as truth was at stake. Henry James once chided H.G. Wells for incorporating autobiography into his novels: ‘There is, to my vision, no authentic, & no really interesting & no beautiful, report of things on the novelist’s, the painter’s part unless a particular detachment has ...”

“... often enough were proved right. Even apparently inconsequential facts could not be relied on: ‘Henry Brulard’ – as artificial a concoction as ‘Stendhal’ – claimed that he thought of writing his life-story at a suitably picturesque place on a gloriously sunny day when he was still on the sunny side of 50. His biographer exposes this engagingly ...”

“... the books in his excellent library and met at his table such great men as Browning, Tennyson and Henry James. Gregory was regarded as a fair landlord, and it has been conjectured that this regrettably unusual reputation was later responsible for Coole getting off so lightly in the desperate days of the Civil War. He believed in Catholic ...”

“... to propagate Catholic views, and he returned to England in 1856, where he was asked by John Henry Newman to go to Dublin, with the prospect of becoming professor of English literature at Newman’s new Catholic university. It was a disaster for Julia, Arnold’s wife, but ” to Newman it felt like a providential coup: the son of the leading Protestant ...”

“... in the early 17th century, when antiquarianism was getting started, to a Yorkshire collector, Henry Savile, and then to the antiquary Sir Robert Cotton, whose books came mostly from the dissolution of the monasteries. The Cottonian library also contained the sole extant copy of Beowulf, which in 1731 narrowly escaped destruction in a serious fire. After a ...”

“... candidate. Up to this point, he had not included Jews in his diatribes. But then he met Henry Coston, a rabid anti-semite and publisher of editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like many embittered ex-servicemen, Darquier was convinced the Jews had stayed at home in 1914, made money and let good Frenchmen fight the Boche. He also believed ...”