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“... daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to come, and Henry James’s manservant (still living in Rye, but with a deaf-aid which had to be plugged into the skirting ) . . . contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like ‘Mr Henry was a heavy man – nearly 16 stone – it ...”

“... kissed me awake, and no one was sorry;The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything,And the high green hill sits always by the sea.‘No one was sorry’ admits to a world in which people might be, but doesn’t concede to it. With its transvaluation of everything via that ‘anything’, and its blissed-out drift from recollected past into incantatory ...”

“... house at Hyde Park Gate, both sisters beautiful, ‘dressed in white muslin, with grass-green ribands round their waists’. Perhaps in that moment, or more likely in this much later one, Margot identified that young woman, shrinking under the conquering gaze of Sir Leslie, as a younger version of herself, the one she dramatised in her novel ...”

“... The abasement of life’s intrinsic qualities. That’s a story.’ ‘You’re probably right, Henry.’ ‘I feel hot about this whole issue, Frank. Sports is just a paradigm of life, right? Otherwise who’d care a goddamn thing about it?’ ‘I know people can see it that way.’ (I try to avoid that idea myself.) ‘But it’s pretty ...”

“... By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor law and the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with ...”

“... immense and monotonous voice of huge billows ceaselessly breaking in an infinity of grey skies, green water and dazzling foam’. He was 38 and clearly needed to learn his new trade, and to pilot himself through the reefs of London publishing waters. Garnett was the very man to help, and to listen to complaints (‘one’s own personality is only a ...”

“... in Britain were not necessarily spurned in, say, India. The biggest manufacturer in Wednesfield, Henry Lane, rather gave the game away in an advertisement for pole traps after the 1904 ban was imposed: ‘NB. It is perhaps superfluous to mention that use of the above traps is now prohibited in the British Isles, but they are still largely used abroad, and ...”

“... to have read more than a hundred books on ancient Carthage before even sitting down to write (Henry James had the sense while reading the novel that there were ‘libraries of books behind his most innocent sentences’). The novel’s air of erudition led a young curator in the Louvre’s Department of Antiquities, Wilhelm Fröhner, to question its ...”

“... in awe of its own virtuosity, a response along the lines of Sydney Smith’s remark on an essay by Henry Brougham: ‘It is long and vigorous, like the penis of a jackass.’ And yet amazingly, and defiantly, beyond its hyper-consciously clever preface, the book picks itself up, dusts itself down, and seems to surprise even itself by getting on with the ...”

“... creations of past ages had begun in the homes of rich collectors in the previous century. In 1896 Henry James described the way Mrs Gereth had furnished her house at Poynton, ‘written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists. It was all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest.’ This ...”

“... her friendships with men whose thinking was to direct her work – principally the idealistic J.R. Green, with his aspiration to regenerate London’s East End, and the humanist T.H. Green, who with Jowett was making Balliol the most sceptical and dynamic college in Oxford. Against all expectations, the university was ...”

“... Whirl up sea – Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir. The sea poem had come a long way from ‘Casabianca’. As a historian, Carr is ecumenical: William Brooke Smith, a student who died of tuberculosis in 1908, is given as much consideration as Pound’s other early ...”

“... dark, from a Hackney-coach’. Motte fretted about several details, including the blue, red and green ribbons for which Lilliputian ministers compete by dancing on ropes. In the published text, he changed the colours to purple, yellow and white; blue, red and green were the colours, respectively, of the Orders of the ...”

“... never spied at all. In 1938, a disappointingly low-level Russian calling himself ‘Michael Green’ appeared in Washington and acquired from Straight a few mildly private memoranda on general themes prepared for the State Department. Straight also handed over some essays in which he suggested to Stalin that his foreign policy was destructive and ...”

“... author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’ Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, relied heavily on Douglas’s Eneados when he translated Books Two and Four of Virgil’s epic into English. Surrey rejected Douglas’s use of rhyming couplets and drew on Italian verso sciolto to create the earliest form of blank ...”