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“... that nothing about so great a figure can be wholly irrelevant, but it seems to me that both Mr Reynolds and Mr Griffin have pushed this argument a bit far. When you’ve read these books you will be exempted from ever attending to another word about Hemingway’s home town Oak Park, a posh suburb of Chicago; and although it may seem a little ungracious to ...”

“... Vaiden is just as firmly rooted in local reality – in this case, the North Carolina about which Reynolds Price has been writing for more than twenty years now. The name, at once plain and elusive, might have appealed to Henry James. The echoes of ‘maiden’ and ‘evading’ are particularly apposite, for despite ...”

“... the Ayrshire coast. We dreaded the visits of my mother’s embarrassing cousin, let’s call him Henry, who had married a Northern Irish woman and gone to live in Belfast. Henry had been shot in the leg by the IRA as he came out of a pub, which gave him a limp and turned him into a booming anti-Catholic bigot. ...”

“... that would have to be junked if it were to be made good. With some obviously difficult writers – Henry James, say, or Geoffrey Hill – one has the sense that a tangled world is being masterfully comprehended. With Paterson (as with Browning, the shadowy double who haunts this volume), it seems rather that simplicity is always just beyond him, whether in ...”

“... begun before Goldsmith arrived in London in February 1756 because in the dedication to his brother Henry he writes that he sent part of it to Henry from the Continent. The poem itself is addressed to Henry, like a letter in verse, expressing a powerful sense of belonging and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not easily defined, yet (or perhaps in consequence) deeply influential. In his early career Henry Kissinger was notoriously critical of Wilson’s legacy, arguing that America needed hard-headed realism, not bright-eyed idealism, to guide its foreign policy. In 1994, however, he sounded a different note: ‘Wilson grasped that America’s instinctive ...”

“... for all the question of why Gillray should have poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a smack at Pamela – was largely confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that ...”

“... rich, is not charmed. A woman leans towards her partner and says: ‘I preferred it when Debbie Reynolds sang it.’The cruelty here has nothing to do with the quality of Cooke’s singing. It lies in Cooke’s failure to understand that an audience like this could exist in New York, and in his acceptance of the disastrous performance as a sort of Station ...”

“... into focus, but you seem to recognise them. They are elegant and casual. The people who come with Reynolds are their contemporaries, but the atmosphere changes. The men have more gravitas and fall naturally into classical poses, the women are winsomely theatrical. The aristocratic Van Dycks tend towards the soulful and control the arrangement of their ...”

“... of the Huntingdon Japanese garden from 1923. Founded in 1919 by the millionaire rail magnate Henry Huntington, the estate now contains a group of museums that display paintings by Gainsborough and Reynolds alongside Boucher tapestries, the 15th-century Ellesmere Chaucer, the autograph manuscript of Thoreau’s ...”

“... Artists could grow quickly famous – and wealthy – via prints of their paintings; Joshua Reynolds’s sold in their thousands. In 1789, the publisher John Boydell opened his ‘Shakespeare Gallery’ in Pall Mall, where, for an entrance fee of one shilling, visitors could enjoy paintings of scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, commissioned by Boydell ...”

“... they favour the Tate because it had been founded at the initiative of another merchant prince, Sir Henry Tate? And why were the gestures of the Duveens so rarely imitated before the new Turner Wing of the Tate, the Clore Gallery, opened in 1987? Spalding is remarkably candid, if often crisp, in her survey of recent developments. These include the attempt made ...”

“... The Medici Venus was admired, as the Cnidian statue had been, in alarming ways. The bibliophile Henry George Quin, for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there ...”

“... Browning, and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for dramatic and narrative ...”