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“... juggled into the beginnings of a sombre Larkin line. In his Preface to the Eliot book, co-editor Peter Holland says that it is not his task ‘to in dicate the potential uses of the concordance’. He does suggest, though, that concordances can have ‘a peculiar magic in their consequential revelations’. He speaks also of ‘the serendipity of ...”

“... before the essentially triangular fullness of their relationship is presented to the audience. As Peter Holland points out in English Comedy (1994), such relationships are notoriously hard to bring into dramatic equilibrium, and Design for Living is perhaps the first play to hold the balance between three sides by pointing them inwards. In the same ...”

“... largest tomes for posterity to ponder over, will not be heavy company. One of the great men of the Holland House circle was Macaulay: but Macaulay did not, apparently, converse. He overwhelmed his hearers with a tidal wave of learning which they were too stunned to check or divert. On the other hand, some of the wits, who gave the talk at ...”

“... Oscar wilde is one of literature’s most bankable brand-names. As the illustrations in Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album demonstrate, this was as true in his fin de siècle as in ours. During Wilde’s lifetime, his celebrity was used to sell Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, Madame Fontaine’s Bosom Beautifier, Straiton and Storm’s cigars and, lastly and mostignominiously, copies of the Illustrated Police Budget ...”

“... Humane, learned, un-showily stylish and at times moving in their tender intelligence, these essays by Anne Barton, ranging from a richly ‘mellow’ piece first published in 1953 – a period when even undergraduates wrote as if they were middle-aged – to the magnificent ‘Wrying a Little’, on Cymbeline, Jacobean marriage law and female desire, are nourishing to the spirit ...”

“... with gender, which involves the perception and social construction of those differences. And as Peter Burke points out in his foreword to this short but intriguing book, even historians of gender (and there are now a few of them around) have not made much of the subject of transvestism as it is explored by these two Dutch historians. Yet, as Burke also ...”

“... it. Millais put up a grand, if conventional mansion in Knightsbridge and Watts led the way to Holland Park, where Lord Leighton turned to brick for his richly decorated studio house – seeming to imply that Belgravian stucco isn’t honest enough for an artist. The house E.W. Godwin built for Whistler in Tite Street was as aesthetically sophisticated as ...”

“... peeled lemon and an elaborate silver-mounted drinking horn – the original horn is in a museum in Holland – is perfect in its detail. But the insistent surfaces, the glitter of the crustacean’s shell and the luxury of it and its trappings, are so meticulously described that you can feel, as you can looking at the perfect photographs in a recipe book, that ...”

“... On 16 May 1940, when the German Army had just overwhelmed Holland, police swooped to arrest 3,000 men born in the Reich but now living in Britain. Some were billeted in the offices of the Tote organisation. Queuing for lunch, one detainee saw an army officer brandishing a revolver at a boy: ‘Are you Jewish?’ the officer asked ...”

“... career. The letters written during this period, particularly those to his friend Julian Holland, are lordly communiqués, full of cinéaste aperçus, literary pastiches, prancing fashion flashes – ‘I now carry a black silk umbrella with a red silk ribbon wound spirally round it’ – and livid accounts of his sexual conquests. Tynan’s adult ...”

“... him reaching for the effects other men achieved, so it is necessary to look further afield than Holland for apt comparisons with the early ones. Wilkie, who knew the Dulwich Gallery, much admired the Watteau there. His touch – in particular his way with fabric – is much more French than Dutch. His sentimental comedies are neither as artful (in the ...”

“... the Netherlands which rebelled against Philip II in the 1560s, only the seven northern provinces (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Gelderland, Groningen and Overijsel) were able to resist the Spanish armies, making good use of their waterlogged terrain for a guerrilla war of combined operations. The result of what the Dutch call their ‘Eighty ...”

“... accidents of war, unquestionably belonged. As Paul Cartledge writes in his introduction to Tom Holland’s new translation of Herodotus, the resemblance Thucydides’ merciless analysis of civil war on Corfu bears to Orwell’s reading of totalitarianism, complete with doublespeak, was exploited to some purpose by Thucydideans in recent times; and the ...”

“... when I decided to hate football for life. It was 11 June 1978 at 6.08 p.m. Scotland were playing Holland in the first stage of the World Cup Finals in Argentina. It happened to be the day of my tenth birthday party: my mother had to have the party after my actual birthday owing to a cock-up involving a cement-mixer and the police, but the party was called ...”

“... In 1834, T.B. Macaulay left Holland House to unaccustomed silences, and set sail for Madras, where he was to save £30,000 and draft the penal code. Indian leisure inspired him to reread Greek. Thucydides, Euripides, Demosthenes, all got good marks. Fiction came off less well. Macaulay was a great reader of novels (to his father’s and Clapham’s distress); the Governor-General’s court wept over his copy of Clarissa ...”