“... mother, Anne Becher, fell in love with a handsome but penniless young soldier, Lieutenant Henry Carmichael-Smyth. Her family falsely told the infatuated girl that her lover was dead of a sudden fever. Anne was shipped out as sexual cargo to India, where she married Thackeray’s more eligible father, who already had a daughter by his Indian ...”

“... her? When she headed to San Francisco in 1967, wasn’t it because she suddenly saw America as a power that could no longer shoulder its people?Order, she sought order. ‘Order and control are terribly important to me,’ she told Michiko Kakutani in 1979, as she caressed ‘a tiny green pillbox’. ‘I would love to just have control over my own body ...”

“... the nine seats they controlled in the Commons were at the heart of Lord Liverpool’s Westminster power base. No one had dared stand against them for more than forty years, but this time their opponent was formidable – Henry Brougham, an energetic liberal who promoted all the wrong causes – and the Lowthers weren’t ...”

“... under siege, in conditions of unremitting squalor and danger. In September 1857, General Sir Henry Havelock ‘relieved’ the city only to find himself effectively trapped inside it; in March 1858, hundreds of casualties later, Lucknow was finally liberated by British troops. It was not until 1859 that the mutiny was fully put down, and British rule ...”

“... particular the loneliness of his early years. Havelock Ellis (he was to drop the family first name Henry for effect) was born in Croydon, to a maritime family (he shared this background with his distant admirer Edward Carpenter). His early years were given over to colonial journeyings that left him self-conscious and unhappy: there were two voyages to ...”

“... indistinct American future, between longstanding social hierarchies and disruptive forces of new power and wealth’, then Sargent was – as Max Beerbohm commented – its ‘supreme interpreter’. That ability stemmed in part, Strouse suggests, from his peripatetic upbringing. Sargent was a certain kind of rootless American. Born in Italy, where he first ...”

“... through Jesus Christ that the stones and beams of our houses would sing hallelujah.The expressive power of the sequence derives not just from lyricism but from the anguish of what is withheld.‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’ is bundled together with two other sequences, ‘Thorow’ and ‘Scattering as Behaviour towards Risk’, establishing ...”

“... achieved, as Bratton drily glosses, with ‘a simple code of conformity glorifying physical power, simplicity of speech and mind, softness of feeling, and self-satisfaction with the state not of manliness, but of being a boy’. Again, we must bear fashion in mind. These childish readers, when grown to rule the Empire, seemed to Santayana the sweetest ...”

“... Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes against property ...”

“... into the West – as in Cooper, who warned, ‘Civilisation has a destroying as well as a creating power,’ but who could never himself resolve, or transcend, the mixture of progress and desecration which the movement West seemed to entail. To many perceptive people ‘taming’ came to seem indistinguishable from ‘exterminating’, whether that referred to ...”

“... in a country practice. The discovery and marketing of insulin put it for the first time within the power of the profession to restore to something like normal life victims of juvenile diabetes who would otherwise have had before them a life of invalidism terminated by early death. The insulin story is here recounted as a sabbatical exercise by the Professor of ...”

“... life, it was men – not women – on whom Boswell chose to lavish his time and full seductive power. Just as it has almost always been men who (as here) have chosen to write about him and scrutinise his words. ‘Open your door ... Sir, to a man that dares to tell you that he deserves to enter it’: thus Boswell’s successful pass at Rousseau. With ...”

“... undoubtedly steals the show, though by no means always winning the day. The book-keeper hero of Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (1668) is one that does come out on top, but in a rather special way. Shipwrecked on a desert island, George Pine, habituated to the work ethic, hits upon the happy idea of substituting reproduction for production, and sets about ...”

“... The next stage of myth-making made Revere and his compatriots more active and aggressive. In 1861, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet laureate of New England, wrote the famous poem, which generations of American schoolchildren were required to learn by heart, and which depicted Revere as a ‘Lone Rider’ who singlehandedly awoke the good people of ...”

“... The Monument men, such as John Nicholas Brown and Mason Hammond, were outraged. But Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum, thought that ‘the American people had earned the right in this war to such compensation if they chose to take it.’ Twenty-five officers of the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Commission signed a ...”