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“... a small anarchy, the members of which do not work together, but scramble against each other’. Henry James would refer to the capital’s ‘horrible numerosity’ and a ‘bigness … fatal to amenity’. But James also saw London as ‘the biggest aggregation of human life’, which – unlike Carlyle’s ‘huge aggregate’ – hints at an agency of ...”

“... of the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to ...”

“... made the journey, so did Henrietta Maria, old Constantyn Huygens from The Hague as well as Louis XIV’s expert vegetable gardener from Versailles. Pepys, often at the dockyard on business and living in Greenwich during the plague, dropped in frequently. Even with his help, Sayes Court is elusive. But in 1699, on his brother George’s death, Evelyn ...”

“... in Harlem’, from Final Solutions, makes irrefutable connections between a boy growing up in St Louis, dreams of a fair black woman, two boys in Harlem, and an account – taken from the Cambridge Ancient History – of the Emperor Hadrian crying to Antinous:                      ‘Your Hadrianus Misses you, Antinous, Misses your ...”

“... to the city was open to anyone day and night did not mean, as Dr Palliser presumes, that the gates were not locked or guarded at dusk. In the chapter on wealth and poverty there are a few generalised repetitions of views which recent research has challenged. In his unqualified tribute to Miss Leonard’s work of 1900 (‘still unsuperseded’), he does ...”

“... Corps of Engineers. His twenties were spent not in battle but damming the Mississippi above St Louis, reviewing blueprints in Washington and renovating Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn. Only during the US invasion of Mexico did he see combat, and even then, as a staff officer, his job was reconnaissance and gun positions. Lee remained aloof from the partisan ...”

“... good against the excesses of private gain. His ancestors include such muckraking journalists as Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose Wealth against Commonwealth told the sordid tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of ...”

“... wise, white witch of the Palais Royal, most earthy of oracles’) and in pieces on Updike, Balzac, Henry James, written with an authority and perception based on lifelong intimacy. He applied the same seriousness with which he encouraged new writers to reviving the careers of older ones – such as Jean Rhys – and restoring writers consigned by accident or ...”

“... what is to be seen: the Olympic rings are not a threat and the sleeping dogs do not stir at the gates. Flagpoles are bare. Joggers, if any can be found, are free to make the elongated circuit or to run up the steeply banked terraces. But noble as the site appears, it is not entirely benign. The poet John Lucas, in 92 Acharnon Street, reminds us that the old ...”

“... as well as institutions such as slavery.The Camargue and its marshes still began, then, ‘at the gates of Arles’. St Caesarius describes them in his sermons as harbouring useless plants and disgusting creatures.In his day, the common language was still Latin, and it was in Latin that he spoke to his congregation. Not all the population was Christian: there ...”

“... Even his admirers could find it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on ...”

“... fails to mention the special status of Pompadour pink, formulated at Sèvres in 1757 to please Louis XV’s favourite mistress and adviser. Both courtly and whorish connotations suffuse Colette’s Chéri novels of the 1920s – the French word rose is warmer, deeper, more ambiguous, in the way of floral perfumes, ‘corrompus, riches et triomphants’.The ...”

“... don’t know her till you have seen her as builder and restorer, designer, decorator, gardener,’ Henry James wrote to another impassioned interior decorator, their mutual friend Mary Hunter, in 1913. At the time, Wharton was contemplating the purchase of a substantial estate near where Hunter lived in Essex; but while this came to nothing, the novelist’s ...”

“... went, physically. The affair was never consummated, which haunted him more than anything: ‘The gates of paradise were once open to me, & I blushed to enter but with the golden keys of love.’ Or more bluntly, in the manuscript: ‘I was only wrong in not pulling up her petticoats.’ Much of this, on Sarah’s part, is the standard coquetry of the ...”

“... Gentlemen were still marked off from Players as first-class cricket enjoyed golden years of huge gates and crowd-pleasing stroke play. There was nothing austere in the manner in which London’s favourite pro, Denis Compton, amassed runs in 1947, and by the end of the decade rare ‘class’ was being shown by such public-school amateurs as Peter May and ...”