“... Writers ought to mix socially with the people they write about. Full marks would have gone to Henry James for his heroic dining out, but nul points to Dickens. ‘He knows the dry arches of London Bridge better than Belgravia. He excels in inventories of poor furniture and is learned in pawnbrokers’ tickets.’ But he had never penetrated the haute ...”

“... an issue (though I recently heard a red-faced Englishman in a Cumbrian pub arguing that nuclear power-stations ‘should all be put in the Hebrides where there’s nobody to blow up’). But Scottish nationalism, and perhaps even nationhood is now active again, aware of the new offshore resources, less sapped by the chronic bleeding of emigration (the nett ...”

“... policy. There the radicals, under the successive leadership of Leicester, of Essex, of Prince Henry and of the third Earl of Pembroke, urged England towards aggressive support for international Protestantism. To note that the divisions among poets reflected divisions among Privy Councillors is to wonder how far writers followed their patrons, a subject on ...”

“... in 1837 the anti-slave-trade movement had shown that ‘one person with a belief is a social power equal to 99 who have only interests,’ as J.S. Mill put it: but it was during the Victorian period that the mass reforming movement reached its apogee. ‘Variety is one of the glories of the voluntary movement,’ Thatcher told the Women’s Royal ...”

“... sex of the Marquise, in those permissive times. Then came a Cinderella-esque marriage to (Baron) Henry de Jouvenal, editor of Le Matin, later a politician of considerable distinction. One thing about Colette interests me: when did she stop lying about her age? The voluptuous dancer was pushing 40 when she married De Jouvenal: ‘But the registry office has ...”

“... patriot and statesman in the Bevin mould and does it rather well – exuding an expansive sense of power being within reach at last.1 May 1997. Run into John Eatwell, formerly economic adviser to the hapless Neil Kinnock and now Lord Eatwell, President of Queen’s, at Cambridge station. We naively agree that it can’t possibly be a landslide, given the ...”

“... my right hand know what my left hand does,’ the President explained to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau (whose own undercutting we can follow in Alan Brinkley’s The End of Reform). This method of human relations worked, paradoxically, better with the women in the President’s private life than with the men in politics. Whereas the men had their ...”

“... religious and royal’. Where the early Robin had fought against the embodiments of local power and injustice – the sheriff and the abbeys who were regarded as corrupt by definition, by their social roles and powers – he now fought only against those who were evil by individual nature. Robin, too, became depoliticised and personalised, opposed ...”

“... a headline declares: ‘Former Easton Waif Unionises Nation’s Unskilled Workers’.In 2024, Henry Palmer, who grew up in Easton, stood for Labour in St George Central Ward. Its two council seats went to the Greens. ‘My campaign was overshadowed by Gaza,’ Palmer says. He felt ‘on the wrong side of history’. In 2013, a Palestinian museum and ...”

“... colonial legacy have failed to prosper’ because they were not counterbalanced by devolution of power to rural areas. Decentralisation, local government, effective popular participation along traditional African lines: this is the direction in which one or two countries ‘have turned or appear increasingly to mean to turn’. For very many Africans, at the ...”

“... after the defeated race of Greek deities was a mistake. Kronos, the leader of the Titans, came to power by castrating his father and was defeated by the Olympians with Zeus at their head. The Titanic’s slightly smaller sister ship, Olympic, survived the Great War and became a great favourite with travellers because she was a replica of her ill-fated kin, a ...”

“... his subjects – close enough to capture the warmth radiating from their skin. Novelists such as Henry James and Proust seem to want to reduce the distance between themselves and their characters virtually to nothing – to bore into their characters’ skulls and take us with them. Cather, rather more conservatively, locates herself about four or five feet ...”

“... a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the ...”

“... He has always had a sizeable Anglophone readership, especially in America, where novelists from Henry Miller (‘I don’t care whether he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to ...”

“... room they’d had last year. The day nursery, which was large, could just about take Teddy, Simon, Henry and Tom.’ There’s even more of this in All Change than in previous instalments. How can Polly (Hugh’s daughter) and her husband, Gerald, make the ugly old house he’s inherited into a viable business? What will everyone buy for everyone else’s ...”