“... organisations. There was large-scale unemployment; wages dropped. The Workingman’s Paradise, as Henry Kingsley had called Australia, turned into an exploitative hell. This was the time that William Lane formed the New Australia movement which settled some four hundred men, women and children in Paraguay in an attempt to establish a socialist commune. It was ...”

“... Ruth as home run baseball floating in the air, unmistakably baseball and unmistakably Ruth. And Henry Major’s Ernst Lubitsch, Will Cotton’s Theodore Dreiser, Hirschfeld’s Bojangles Robinson, and more and more, all well-known and all made new. That shock of the familiar, the celebrity instantly recognisable by the trademark logo that the artist ...”

“... in reality. As a youth – in Belfast, of all places – he had been under the influence of Henry James to the point of writing to the Master boldly and getting flattering replies. As for the ‘pagan supernatural’, that had been stimulated by Forster’s The Celestial Omnibus and the stories and poems of Walter de la Mare. The latter pair had become ...”

“... Shirley Temple. There are ribbons and rosy cheeks and ringlets and more than a touch of Henry James. In a letter to her father, Lawrence wrote of his wish to ‘snatch’ a fleeting moment of beauty before the inevitable ‘change’ took place. The whole effect is, at least to modern tastes, quite revolting.Degas’s Miss Murray is different. He ...”

“... François I’s service in 1515 or 1516, and Lucas Horenbout, born in Ghent and first recorded in Henry VIII’s in 1525.The oldest miniature on display in The Reflected Self is a portrait by the Horenbout family workshop, c.1544-50, depicting a lady often said to be Catherine Parr – though the exhibition’s curators plausibly suggest that she is more ...”

“... Pater. It was a world in which everybody seemed to know everybody: Lang’s friend Charlotte Green was the wife of the philosopher T.H. Green and the sister of John Addington Symonds, the historian of the Renaissance.But his social successes hid intellectual frustrations. Lang wanted to use his fellowship to make a ...”

“... for years. I belonged, of course, to the metaphor people and Kleist had made me see that mine was Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’. This is the story of Spencer Brydon, in his mid-fifties, who has spent 33 years abroad enjoying ‘the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity’, running away from ‘the ugly things of his faraway ...”

“... the title Camille. Posed against a red curtain on a canvas more than seven feet high, a woman in a green and black striped gown and a black jacket trimmed with fur stands with her back angled towards the viewer, her face partly visible as she turns her head over her shoulder and raises one gloved hand in a gesture both elegant and ambiguous. Though one critic ...”

“... ambiguously, has called it ‘the intellectual equivalent of Space NK’. The school’s olive green frontage is on Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Library and the University of London’s central campuses, between an internet café and a hairdresser’s. When I went there a few weeks ago, the Rolling Stones were on the stereo and ...”

“... his voice as he shouts? A police car, lights on, is parked behind him. Beyond the car the black-green of a band of trees is broken by a few bright spots; they could be streetlights or house lights half-obscured by foliage. It must be night time. Are they crime-scene floodlights that shine across the lake, on the man, grass, rocks and car? Although the ...”

“... of all the workshops, were decisively in favour of the Move. C.R.A. was born in 1863, the son of Henry Spencer Ashbee, a wealthy businessman and bibliophile and, as his granddaughter has pointed out to me, a serious pornographer. The mother was from a good Hamburg Jewish family, of the kind that in every generation produces a sensitive aesthete to plague ...”

“... they were making their way home after an exciting night out. They included brambles and chartreuse green cymbidium orchids in trailing arrangements that brought passers-by to a halt. Spry’s reputation was made. She worked with Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel and began to acquire her own celebrity clients. When Beaton photographed Wallis Simpson in 1937 ...”

“... more variously and with high composure, that there is something more primary than enlightenment. Henry James said of Eugénie de Guérin and her piety, what could not be said of Heaney and his, that she ‘was certainly not enlightened’. Yet when James went on, ‘But she was better than this – she was light itself,’ the respectful directness of this ...”

“... controls is incompatible with a whole-hearted return to laissez-faire. Yet the sanctity of the Green Belt is a mainly South-Eastern shibboleth which has been more warmly defended by a vocal public opinion than has any article of faith in a free economy, even though that same public is quick enough off the mark in chasing the best bargain buys in the ...”

“... revolution has had the curious result that they communicate not with other human beings but with green screens, fax machines and modems. Graham Coster and Alex Comfort have each written a Condition-of-England novel for the Yuppie age, but they have handled the task in diametrically opposite ways. Coster’s protagonist, Greg, forsakes his computer terminal ...”