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“... to Egypt in early 1967 that appeared last month in Al-Ahram Weekly. One was in a review of Bernard-Henry Lévy’s recent book on Sartre; the other was a review of the late Lotfi al-Kholi’s account of that visit (al-Kholi, a leading intellectual, was one of Sartre’s Egyptian hosts). My own rather forlorn experience with Sartre was a very minor episode in a ...”

“... ambiguity, because it confounds moral life with doctrine or dogma. We need only the reminder of Henry James, who, while cautioning against any ‘moral restrictions set upon the field of consciousness’, affirmed the moral character of art: ‘to count out the moral element in one’s appreciation of an artistic total is exactly as sane as it would be (if ...”

“... It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.             Henry James, Life of Hawthorne But, first of all, is there a history of silence?    Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Literary history? Can there still be people who believe in it – or them: literature, history, literary history? Are not all texts on the same level, just texts? Is history not something synchronic, merely a different way of talking about language? The views implied by these rhetorical questions seem wrong to many people, myself included ...”

“... sovereignty which in any case Calvin never wanted for it. Alastair Duke on the Netherlands, Henry Cohn on Germany, Robert Evans on Eastern Europe, Patrick Collinson on England are all as alive to the limits as to the extent of Calvin’s influence on churches which drew eclectically from a range of Protestant and Humanist thought both native and ...”

“... George Robey, Harry Lauder, Dan Leno and Vesta Tilley rubbed shoulders with the likes of Sir Henry Wood, Sarah Bernhardt and the Ballets Russes. Dickens was fascinated by the performing style of Charles Mathews, a blacked-up minstrel, and put it to use in his own public readings, though without the burned cork. T.S. Eliot revered Marie Lloyd, and the ...”

“... and industry, Conjectures of Order can be ranked with another vast work of American history: Perry Miller’s two-volume study The New England Mind. Miller’s hope for that book was similar to O’Brien’s: he sought to recover the Puritans from the dismissive views of his contemporaries, who had been inclined to see ...”

“... poetic sequence Modern Love, when she traumatised Meredith by leaving him for their artist friend Henry Wallis). Jane died in 1851, and Peacock’s record as a widower confirms the sense of desperation. The following year – emboldened at this point in his career by financial security – he proposed marriage to Claire Clairmont’s niece, a 27-year-old ...”

“... series of what may be formally Shakespeare’s own invention, the English History Plays, work in Henry IV, I and II to a climax that could be subtitled ‘Fathers and Sons’. Implicit in these Histories from the first is a tragic potential: the weak Henry VI must observe the effect of his weakness, a son who has killed ...”

“... books and papers so that it can be used for the filming.I first saw the house in 1968. Jonathan Miller lives in the same street and Rachel, his wife, saw the ‘For Sale’ sign go up. It belonged to an American woman who kept parrots and there were perches in the downstairs room and also in its small garden. Slightly older than the other houses in the ...”

“... version of MacDiarmid’s pastures to work at the London Review of Books, the editor, Karl Miller, had a powerful sense of what connected literature to the land, and even the urban writers he liked – Kingsley Amis, for instance – were filled with a sense of hinterland, or winterland, of childhood places and beginnings. Many powerful writers, in ...”

“... his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can produce.’ He remarked of his friend Henry Ford: ‘This fellow Ford is like a postagestamp. He sticks to one thing until he gets there.’ He had a way of making his recipe for success seem dead simple: ‘I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.’He chose words like ...”

“... there are forty occasions when someone has a drink. It begins in Gorizia, where our hero, Frederic Henry (he’d better have his name; we’re going to be with him for a while), sits watching the snow falling while he drinks a bottle of Asti with a friend. Later, over too much wine and Strega, he explains to a priest his regret at not having gone to ...”

“... talents: but she outdid them in using it, most touchingly of all, to arrange her death. Betty Miller intuited this, some years back, in her excellent little book on Browning. Elizabeth herself intuited that her husband and son, tremendous and eupeptic pals as they were, had really no further use for her; and in a sense they confirmed this by their calm ...”

“... authors and titles with events (Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone the same year that Henry James published Roderick Hudson; Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems coincided with Coca-Cola’s adoption of its ‘distinctly shaped bottle’). Still, naturalists have their molluscs, entomologists their butterflies: why shouldn’t literary critics indulge ...”

“... natural to the knight and the squire, appears to us with scarcely less realism than the people of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen.’ Ostensibly Holmes is only comparing the art, the ‘realism’, of Chaucer with that of novelists four centuries later. But the implication is that ‘realism’ means writing about what Jane Austen would have written about ...”