“... Farm. Malthus acknowledged that his view of life ‘has a melancholy hue’, but pleaded that he drew ‘these dark tints from a conviction that they are really in the picture; and not from a jaundiced eye, or an inherent spleen of disposition’. For this bleakness, and for the austere social policies he recommended, Enlightened thinkers and their Romantic ...”

“... pink; Rattleton Traplegh was (only think!) Sadly addicted to flirting with Mrs Saphira Wallabie Smith. The names at least are a minor addition to Anglo-Indian humour: in a Ford Madox Ford novel, one would be a place, the other Head of a beastly Public School for Middle-Class Girls. Kipling was adept at parody. By writing with Tennysonian or Arnoldian ...”

“... of implying that a home visit in old age from Kurt Cobain or a graveside serenade from Patti Smith has the same cultural importance as the writing of Nova Express and The Wild Boys. Burroughs’s actual achievement seems incidental to the glitzy mythologising of his remaining intimates, though still a bone of contention gnawed by literati. Hardly ...”

“... by her. Particularly by her claim that she didn’t see the point of making things up: that she drew on her family and childhood for her early novels and historical data for her later work. He overdoes it. He often seems to be fighting an imaginary adversary: a reader who thinks that fiction is a code, who opens a novel and gets cross if an autobiography ...”

“... of self-love put forward by Condillac and Helvétius and naturalised into England by Adam Smith and Bentham. Hazlitt raged against reaction and tyranny in England, but the intellectual roots of what he raged against were French, not English. Even the group which welcomed 1789 most warmly, the politically active ministers of the Dissenting ...”

“... Crazy Cock, Miller depicts the desperation that overtook him when his second wife, June Mansfield Smith, skipped to Europe in 1927 with her lesbian lover Jean Kronski, obliging a broke and humiliated 36-year-old Miller to move back in with his parents in Brooklyn and take a non-writing job. He had yet to set up house in Paris: Crazy Cock is his poorly done ...”

“... in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was born in 1843 into a family that Logan Pearsall Smith described as a ‘fine old succession of country people, “quality folk” as they are called’, but with more interest in the arts than many such families. The Jekylls had a life-size cast of the Venus de Milo in the dining-room. They moved to Surrey ...”

“... and caution: but in Britain he has sometimes been received with a suspicious snort. Martin Seymour-Smith writes in his useful guide, Novels and Novelists, that ‘The Recognitions, a complex novel about forgery and illusion, was found by most critics to be impenetrable and possibly pretentious.’ Now that The Recognitions of 1955 and JR of 1975 are being ...”

“... pornography of the written word. But it is clear enough that, as Harrow’s tradition of beating drew to a close, the ethics of writing (as well as of practice) entered the controversy. Tyerman casts his eye equally effectively on other, sometimes awkward aspects of Harrow’s history. His story of low-level, endemic racism and anti-semitism in the school up ...”

“... this and that and little income tax, They probably earn seven times as much As poor old Grosvenor-Smith. But who will grudge Them this, their wild spontaneous holiday? The morning paddle, then the mystery tour By motor-coach inland this afternoon. For that old mother what a happy time! This can be taken as either straight or not straight, but either way it ...”

“... full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.’ Herbert Smith, President of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, told a wages inquiry in 1924 that in the previous year 212,256 men received injuries disabling them for more than seven days, and in addition 1,297 were fatally injured. These figures mean ...”

“... and other scientists, who maintained that if a phenomenon was inexplicable it did not exist, and drew on experience and intuition. Her author, one Horace Smith, had based his novel partly on his own encounters with mesmerism, and probably also on the famous case of the writer Harriet Martineau. Even his modest invalid knew ...”

“... have been a milliner’s assistant ... or a poorly paid governess hurrying to her pupils. As I drew near the pavement the girl looked up and I all but sat flat down in the road. For the first and only time in my life I beheld perfect beauty. The face was that of the lost Venus of Praxiteles, and of all the copies handed down to us must have been ...”

“... one that he is stuck for ever in the era of the liberation struggle. During the many years of Ian Smith’s white minority regime, it seemed there was little that Mugabe’s party, Zanu, could do in the face of white power. Zanu’s armed wing, Zanla, was no match for the better trained and better equipped Rhodesians, and Mugabe dreamed in vain of driving out ...”

“... afford to live in big cities like London and New York. But the world that incubated Russell, and drew out all the snaking tendrils of his offbeat eclecticism, is long gone. Lofts once inhabited by breadline artists, musicians and filmmakers are now the sole preserve of billionaires. The cross-pollination that allowed Russell to switch between different ...”