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“... He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it’: T.S. Eliot writing of Henry James in the Little Review of August 1918. I want to take exception, not to the truth of Eliot’s pronouncement (he was right about James), but to the set of lofty assumptions calmly towering behind it. The young Eliot’s epigram summed up with cutting brevity a creed that for Modernists appeared beyond dispute ...”

“... Catherine of Aragon was Henry VIII’s first and longest-lasting queen, at the heart of his glittering court for almost two decades. In the early years of their marriage, the Spanish princess, daughter of the most glamorous monarchs in Europe, must have seemed every bit as regal as her husband. Yet in the historiography of Tudor England she has become a shadowy figure, a sad frump eclipsed by her savage husband and the brazen mistress who supplanted her ...”

“... book goes on, until the reader is as keen as his friends are to get rid of him. And then there’s Henry, who dominates the others with his awesome intellect, frosty demeanour, impeccable deportment and deep-seated but never advertised generosity. Henry is very cool – and just a bit mad. The pace of the plot is ...”

“... admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic objection to such a dedication as Thomas Moore’s, of Lalla Rookh: – To Samuel Rogers, Esq., this Eastern Romance is inscribed by his very grateful and affectionate friend, Thomas Moore. But one may object that is not so interesting or original in its ...”

“... isolation on the world stage. After the break with Rome, complete by 1534, England stood alone. Henry VIII’s imperial claims, couched in Thomas Cromwell’s majestic legalese, were introspective, asserting the power of the monarch freed from the constraints of papal rule. The economy was beset by inflation, there were ...”

“... go to bed.’ Alexandre Dumas’s first words were ‘I shall never know how it all comes out.’ Thomas Edison’s first words were ‘It is very beautiful over there.’ John Ford’s first words were ‘May I please have a cigar?’ Ulysses S. Grant’s first word was ‘Water.’ Prince Henry’s first words were ‘I ...”

“... were respected. Not so the visitors who paid to see them. First Coleridge and the Romantics, then Henry James and Virginia Woolf, then the New Critics of the 1930s, followed by Barthes, Derrida and the deconstructionists, have scolded literary tourists. ‘The author’s dead!’ they’ve told these vagrant supplicants again and again. ‘So go home, sit ...”

“... between ‘three million years’ and ‘this time next week’ is more than simply arithmetical. Thomas Hardy’s use of ‘deep time’ in his novels has not been lost on scientists, and has been the subject of a recent reappraisal by the palaeontologist Kevin Padian. Hardy’s characters are often first seen as minuscule figures set against a vast backdrop ...”

“... conspirators are not Jews but Jesuits. The Protocols was taken up by Tsar Nicholas II, Hitler and Henry Ford, who in the 1920s had half a million copies of it printed, even though it had been conclusively shown to be an anti-semitic fraud in 1921. There is a striking paradox here: as in most racist conspiracy theories, the people accused of possessing ...”

“... over forty – ‘make the best subjects,’ which would explain the contents (James Hewitt to Henry Kissinger by way of Geoffrey Boycott, Charlton Heston, Dave Lee Travis and Norman Tebbit), but you have to wonder how much of a coincidence it is that men over forty not only ‘make the best subjects’ but also make the best Telegraph readers. Farndale ...”

“... when Crane was only 23, is short and centres on the battlefield experience of a man younger still, Henry Fleming, who worries that in the test of war he will prove a coward, and then does. Some rough germ of an idea for the novel had been with Crane for years. As a child he fantasised about war and in his teens he contemplated West Point and a military ...”

“... Frances Milton waited until she was 30 before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ of a rich, unmarried and conveniently antique uncle. The dutiful Mrs Trollope had seven children in ten years (only two were to survive into mature age), while her husband contrived to ruin ...”

“... give a reason for Marlowe’s arrest, but we know it was connected to the arrest of his colleague Thomas Kyd a few days earlier, on a charge of political libelling. During the search of Kyd’s lodgings, a certain ‘vile heretical’ manuscript was found, and under interrogation Kyd ‘affirmed’ that it belonged to Marlowe; other evidence of Marlowe’s ...”

“... style (intimate letters, transcribed conversations) with a minimum of authorial mediation. Thomas De Quincey invited comparison with Rousseau in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, but relinquished Rousseau’s sense of personal control. The opium becomes a rival protagonist of his story, almost at times a rival author. It strips away the ‘veil ...”

“... Although Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91, and was one of the most famous philosophers of his day, there are only 211 surviving letters to or from him. This compares with 3656 to or from Locke, some twenty thousand to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them ...”