“... trying to reform the healthcare system. When looking outwards, he could pay more attention to the power of words. ‘He turned to speeches as a vehicle to reorient American foreign policy, to communicate a new direction not just to the American people and audiences abroad but to his own government.’ Yet because he had his own priorities, his speechwriter ...”

“... happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines of life have a strange affinity with ...”

“... the women minded it more), then it must have been as obscure as the hurt allegedly suffered by Henry James, since nobody so far has convincingly explained it. Ted’s father and grandfather were convivial, easygoing men, rooted in their native Kent, fond of a drink and ready to pinch any passing bottom. On his 80th birthday, Heath père, who had started ...”

“... I was put on disability benefits. I had more money, until my father died. Labour were back in power but Tony Blair seemed to like Margaret Thatcher. He didn’t end the persecution even though I voted for him. When he came to Reading he got a standing ovation from everyone except me. I’d given up going to the Commons, having seen Tam Dalyell just once ...”

“... is,’ he says, ‘a moving example of the mysterious transmission of a great literary power by the “way” of blood.’ A little earlier, about a new book by the Comtesse de Noailles, he was telling readers of the Figaro about the grace of ‘poet-women’, and pointing out how sadly lacking in this quality mere ‘poet-men’ were. It was not ...”

“... In the 1910s Cather was a minimalist from the cornfields, a bright spot in the long shadow of Henry James. Her sentences were lucid, patient, imagistic. Like her contemporaries Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson, she picked a fight with smalltown America. But smalltown America has always forgiven her, because Cather always also wanted to celebrate its ...”

“... insulated from the ironical comments about him’, yet he exercised his own tastemaking power with a certain irony – as when he bet Amy Lowell $100 that E.E. Cummings’s work would be seen as part of the canon by 2 June 1935. Thayer has remained a minor figure in the history of modernism partly because he did so little to promote himself. Before ...”

“... that ‘this isn’t the person I married,’ and one doesn’t need to be unwell to feel what Henry James felt, writing to Rhoda Broughton in November 1915 after she had praised one of (what he called) his ‘old perpetrations’: ‘I think of it, the masterpiece in question, as the work of quite another person than myself, at this date – that of a ...”

“... can reach 200 miles per hour on the stoop – but none can fly horizontally, under its own power, as quickly as a pigeon. Feral pigeons are close cousins of the hundreds of varieties of fancy pigeon that have been bred since their domestication by the Sumerians four thousand years ago. The most celebrated, and familiar, of these is the racing homer, a ...”

“... wet collodion process, invented in 1851 following the breakthroughs of Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. The daguerreotype was an image printed directly onto a glass plate; Talbot’s calotype was a translucent negative image from which positive images could be reproduced. The drawback of the calotype was its lack of sensitivity, which resulted in ...”

“... the first history of Dorset’s birds. Of the other characters involved, the Earl of Ilchester was Henry Stephen Fox-Strangways (1787-1858), who lived at Melbury House near Evershot, in west Dorset. Built in the 16th century, Melbury is a grand English country house with formal gardens, lakes and an extensive deer park. Lord Digby (1809-89) was Sir Edward St ...”

“... many ways in which, on this side of the Channel, the medieval was employed to invest contemporary power with glamour and authority. Among the incisively captioned illustrations is David Wilkie’s painting of George IV in Highland dress – the outfit he wore for his entry into Edinburgh in 1822 (an event that was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the ...”

“... the same as that of about a hundred statues of saints in niches still to be seen in the chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey, which was constructed according to specifications contained in the king’s will. By honouring the saints in this way, he hoped that they would ease his passage in the afterlife, just as he hoped that the effigy on his tomb would ...”

“... used in English medieval architecture and sculpture is also a limestone. Barry notes that Master Henry of Avranches, the cosmopolitan 13th-century Latin poet and secular priest, likened Purbeck stone to the shining jasper mentioned in the Bible, and to the sheen of a fingernail (an allusion, I suppose, to onyx, the name of which derives directly from the ...”

“... Florine Stettheimer​ was a rich New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by squirrels and ferrets and showing a lot of leg ...”