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“... horses both ways. He perhaps gave this unpretentious first comedy a far more ambitious partner. Henry VI Part I is now judged to be so packed with uncertainties and difficulties of authorship, dating and text, style and subject, that one hardly dares to call it Shakespeare’s first history play. If it is, it raises a question so radical, and so interesting ...”

“... chamber’. The work as a whole is a study of how decisions were made and implemented under Henry VIII. In the process, of course, Dr Starkey sheds a flood of light on many of the key decisions that were made. While his supervisor, Sir Geoffrey Elton, has always looked for the administrative structure, he himself will always look for the organisation of ...”

“... maintains its undying faith in What Really Matters in Life. The observations that, for example, Henry and Caroline never cry at funerals, but only at carols, that Sloanes never ‘go’ anywhere but always ‘whizz’, ‘toddle’, ‘rush’, ‘beetle’, ‘tear’ or ‘zoom’, and that ‘Hooray Henrys’ Get Pretty Pissed, not to show they can hold ...”

“... do indeed start with an intent adolescent watcher of a Mafia hangout, a young Irish-Italian named Henry Hill, and his fascination does lead him to a compromising involvement in illegality and a witnessing of horrific violence. He undergoes something of an ordeal and he too ends by extricating himself from the guilt of his actions and co-operating with the ...”

“... by the case of a couple who had served as custodians of the Shakespeare house in Stratford, Henry James constructed a marvellously ironic narrative about the ‘stupid’ avidity of a public who care nothing for the artist’s work and everything for his legend, flocking to the shrine to see ‘where He hung up His hat and where He kept His boots and ...”

“... Edith Wharton once asked Henry James why it was that his novels so curiously lacked real life. James’s private name for her was the ‘Angel of Devastation’, and the fact that she not only perpetrated this remark but went on to record it expressionlessly in her memoirs shows just what he meant. It might be said that by then James had got used to the situation anyway, since for the previous thirty years much the same question had been asked by that large majority of the late-Victorian reading public who simply refused to read his books: after the last mild success of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, James experienced half a lifetime of small and dwindling sales, which culminated, in the case of the New York Collected Edition, in total failure ...”

“... What strikes one about the garden at Lamb House, as redesigned by Henry James, is that it possesses all the ingredients of an old-English garden, yet the impression it makes is American. It seems on principle to want to do without mystery, even the mild mysteries beloved of English gardening-folk. In some indefinable way it is a public garden ...”

“... and elegy. One way of understanding this miscellaneous volume, the key foundational text in Henry Power’s edition, which seeks, as he explains, ‘to give a sense of Pope’s development as a writer’ – and to attest to what Howard Erskine-Hill called ‘a life of such concentrated diversity’ – is as an early anthology of his attitudes to ...”

“... In 1904​ Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume ...”

“... On​ their West Country progress in the summer of 1535, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn visited Thornbury Castle near Bristol. Thornbury is an upmarket hotel now, a popular choice for guests working through their bucket list. Now that every narrative is a ‘journey’, TripAdvisor is an illuminating guide to what people expect when they go in search of the past ...”

“... Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias Canetti. Behind its approachable modesty, its avoidance of every publicity and image-making process, there is a loftiness, an assurance, a stance of absolute superiority ...”

“... in his second instalment sets him off on what turns out to be an equally frustrated pursuit of power. It may seem curious that we are being asked to regard a man of such dazzling achievement as repeatedly failing in his aims, and at this stage we can only speculate about what he will be pursuing and not catching up with in Volume III. However that may ...”

“... The first thing​ people noticed about Henry, perhaps the only thing they noticed, was his droopy left eyelid. He was blond, of medium height for the times and pleasant looking, but otherwise unremarkable. Nobody ever claimed that he was clever. Later on, exasperated chroniclers denounced him as ‘simple-minded’, ‘senseless’ and ‘useless’ – simplex, insipiens, inutilis ...”

“... In a dawn raid​ on 24 April 1509, troops reporting to England’s new king, the 17-year-old Henry VIII, arrested two of his late father’s closest councillors and took them to the Tower of London. Three days earlier, Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had died aged 52, in his privy chamber at Richmond Palace ...”

“... professionally on this subject were outstanding. They understood that, given the vast disparity of power between Israel and the Palestinians, without determined American intervention the outcome of the conflict would be entirely on Israel’s terms. But US politicians consistently undercut its diplomats by assuring Israel’s governments that even though the ...”