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“... that it was in / And was in what the place was’ is how a verbal sketch of a reclining figure by Henry Moore begins (A Man in My Position); and for a specimen of his tangled line in love-poetry one could hardly improve on a snippet from ‘Morning Song’ in The World’s Room (1974), where the loved one is treated to an especially problematical ...”

“... theory of history similar to that of Vico and taken over by Matthew Arnold from his father Thomas: the fifth century BC, when Greek religion was challenged by the Greek enlightenment, was often held to correspond with the period when the modern Enlightenment was challenging Christianity. The third method depended upon Comte’s theory of the three ...”

“... his drinking bouts. Under the prosecutor’s eye he can be made to look like a less amiable Dylan Thomas. The merit of the stories and poems called in to excuse or justify such a life has also been questioned. D.H. Lawrence called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ an overdone and vulgar fantasy. Yvor Winters said Poe’s was an art for servant girls. Both ...”

“... Columbus, gesturing knowingly towards the dissected corpse, as if to reinforce the words of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.’ Echoes of the notion that psychological probing resembles the work of the dissecting scalpel appear in the titles of widely read works such as ...”

“... in the CSCE, agreeing to participate mainly in order to further the emerging détente with Moscow. Henry Kissinger could have played a starring role if he’d wanted to, but he worried that the Western Europeans’ obsession with human rights and freedom of movement would interfere with superpower détente, especially the delicate negotiations over nuclear ...”

“... he published his first short-story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. This was praised by Thomas Pynchon as well as Wolff, and since then Saunders has been about as successful as a scrupulous writer of offbeat stories can be. He has returned to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. ...”

“... of national prosperity. A ragged girl in a Midlands nail factory was interviewed by Richard Henry Horne. She did not, he reported, ‘know what a country dance is, was never at a dance in her life; never saw a dance; never heard of Harlequin and Columbine; has no idea what they are like.’ Horne, peculiarly, is recalling pantomime conventions that were ...”

“... he was 21, his father decamped to South Africa). His marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls, daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, one of his writer heroes, ended in 1857 after she absconded with the painter Henry Wallis. Meredith took sole custody of their four-year-old son, Arthur; Mary Ellen died in 1861. There are photographs of ...”

“... to erase a memory. They were made in the early years of the Protestant Reformation; in 1535 Henry VIII demanded that his subjects strike out all references to the pope in their prayer books. This was book damage not as transgression but as legal prescription. ‘All manner [of] … books … wherein the said Bishop of Rome is named … [are] utterly to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sufferer from the complaint of Flaubert. The latter stood away from life as from a leprosy. And Thomas Mann, like Flaubert, feels vaguely that he has in him something finer than ever physical life revealed.’ Lawrence’s heroic vitalism, his belief that ‘physical life’ is the highest value we can know, includes a refusal of what he saw as the ...”

“... of the evening told me the following story. In 1945 he had been engaged as a book reviewer for Henry Luce’ Time magazine. Or he thought he had been so engaged. When he turned up for work, he was informed that Whittaker Chambers, chief Pooh-Bah of the ‘back of the book’, wished to see him. He entered the sanctum and found the stout, surly presence ...”

“... Quatermain sequence – which ran to 18 books – is bound, however, to remember the figure of Sir Henry Curtis, Bt. the English Victorian quasi-Viking whom Haggard carefully manoeuvred into situation after situation where he could fulfil the Dasent fantasy and fight, axe in hand and made-in-Birmingham mail-coat belted on, in blameless battle against ...”

“... whom the protagonists dispatch. In Saturday (2005), the successful, self-satisfied neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, who happens to live on the leafy London square where McEwan lived at the time, finds his home invaded, a family gathering despoiled and his daughter stripped naked, by a thug called Baxter and his sidekick, Nige. It’s the ultimate middle-class ...”

“... been to be safely married off. But that she intended otherwise is implied by what she wrote to Henry VIII in presenting him with her New Year’s gift for 1546. As his daughter, she would be ‘not only the imitator of his virtues but also heir to them’. Mind, and character, are much in evidence in these two books: a substantial, scholarly, but ...”