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“... furniture, and you witness the change in sensibility from Ruskin to Pater or from Dickens to Henry James. Yet from start to finish Webb never plumps for a clear style. Standen’s elevations are anything but Classical, and Red House is not really Gothic, though it emerges out of a line of middling-sized houses by the Goths Webb most admired ...”

“... distinguished by the most alliterative opening sentences I have ever read’. (‘Boom! went the bell of St Botolph’s, bidding her boys from book and board. Clang! came the curfew of Carfax, calling the citizens from counter and cloth-yard.’) From time to time Bernard would show up in Sussex and bark orders in ‘his military voice’ – he had others ...”

“... angry tenacity prevented her from achieving as she should have done. There are characters, like Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, who did each other good but – fortunately, no doubt, for them – were much too self-absorbed to ascribe dominance to someone else. One cannot imagine either saying: ‘The one who dictates inside is you.’ More temperately, Nin ...”

“... accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years liked, a picture with a story they could follow and explain to one another. Not that it had to be a nice ...”

“... of decent emotion and decent understatement, derived perhaps from Trollope’s favourite Henry Esmond (which Sutherland has edited), is not infrequent in the Companion, for there are many comparably harrowing stories to be evoked: This was the period of the Irish famine and Mrs Bell Martin ... devoted herself to ...”

“... knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest daughter, Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte ...”

“... This is the first full-length study of James Thomson’s life and work since Henry Salt’s in 1889. Thomson’s poem The City of Dreadful Night is known by name to many but has seldom been reprinted or discussed. Histories of literature say more about an earlier James Thomson (1700-48) who wrote The Seasons and ‘Rule Britannia’ and got into Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, though Johnson says his diction was ‘florid and luxuriant ...”

“... when exhausted, even offered money to passing schoolchildren to take it in turn to ring the door bell. One night well after midnight, some friends who lived opposite lured the smaller night shift of newspapermen away momentarily, while she and her family ran quickly across the mews into a friend’s house (they had left the door on the latch for just such an ...”

“... Oliver Wendell Holmes (72). A. C. Benson (67), Sherwood Anderson (64), George Santayana (61), Henry Miller (56), Emerson (55), William James (49), Nietzsche (46) and Anaïs Nin (40). These are only the familiar names; the unknown table-talkers, maxim-mongers and cracker-barrel wiseacres buttonhole the reader hardly less repetitively. Among the prolific ...”

“... from the one awaiting visitors to Charleston. There, the pictures were surrounded by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s exuberant decorations: patterned curtains and stencilled walls, painted door panels and richly emblazoned pottery.At Tilton the rooms were not so well proportioned and there was no flourishing garden. Lydia was not particularly ...”

“... in art and architecture but also in music, theatre, cinema, literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire ...”

“... played as a young woman. Louisa May Alcott thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the one, or to ...”

“... deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds Henry Bate and William Jackson, successive editors of the Morning Post, who gave themselves up to sparrings and scandals, and whose journalistic darts were dipped in poison. They were reckless and factional men in a reckless and factional age: E.S. Turner has ...”

“... of passing on her heritage – her knowledge of Richardson, Fielding, Jane Austen, Trollope and Henry James. Apart from Henry Green, Graham Greene and Adrian Bell, it seems that she hadn’t much use for contemporary authors. She was addicted to Scrabble and ‘Words from a ...”

“... art: ‘plastic art’, ‘plastic merit’ and ‘plastic beauty’ were high compliments. Henry James, describing an aesthete, notes that ‘his appreciation ... was based partly on his fine sense of the plastic.’ Yet a hundred years after Baudelaire the figurative meaning of ‘plastic’ had fallen; it was now nearly synonymous with words like ...”