“... isn’t a useful guide to anything much except what happened to Doughty in the Desert, a short passage of Arabian history intersecting an aberrant fragment of the development of English literary sensibility, an unrepeatable moment in which everything is already different from the way it had been when Burton penetrated Mecca in drag, and from the way it ...”

“... of élitism and philistinism. The fact that the PEN/Faulkner awards panel included the novelist Charles Johnson, Guterson’s writing instructor – who also provided a puff for the book – did not seem to arouse any concern, but then the chances of finding a judge from the writing-seminar circuit who had no connection with Guterson were quite slim. Set in ...”

“... of more rewarding passengers: officers bound for India, women who brought along harps and pianos. Passage in such a ship, partly a warship, partly a freighter and partly a passenger vessel, was quite unlike anything that could now be experienced. Cabins were jury-rigged of canvas, so that they could be rapidly dismantled if the guns needed to be run ...”

“... routine question on ‘just cause and impediment’. And those equally ‘literary’ figures of Charles and Di, the gallant prince leading his innocent young bride to the altar, provide an image of romance that still manages to support even the cheapest shotgun wedding. Surprisingly, Rubinstein found no place in her anthology for this royal epitome of ...”

“... as he says it is. He is treading geographically but not methodologically in the footsteps of Charles Booth. His aim is to convey to his readers as vividly as he can just how awful are the lives of the poor and powerless inhabitants of the inner cities of a supposedly civilised nation which ought to be a great deal more ashamed of allowing such conditions ...”

“... sat in the Commons at some time during this period; and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for ...”

“... who make many species are the “splitters” and those who make few are the “lumpers”,’ Charles Darwin wrote in 1857 to his friend, the great botanist Joseph Hooker. This first recorded appearance of the handy distinction between those who bundle up the data into one big theory and those who prefer to lay out the exhibits on the table in carefully ...”

“... Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the end. A novel and film of the period captures a proletarian version of this easy-to-grasp ...”

“... of the Conquistadors led to his official appointment as ‘Protector of the Indians’ and to the passage of the New Laws which gave the Indians some nugatory protection. In ancient Athens, Plutarch tells us, there were furious attacks on Pericles in the Assembly over the tributes extorted from the island colonies, which were supposed to pay for ships to ...”

“... etc? If he despises William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Edith Sitwell, Augustus John and Ted Hughes, what’s the merit of vulgarity and spleen? Many trees have been cut down to make the paper on which Grigson has spewed his contempt for teachers, critics, literary editors, the scholars who retain Emily ...”

“... would like to see Miliband in Downing Street can take heart from another notable trend: since the passage of the Parliament Act in 1911, which reduced the maximum life of a parliament from seven years to five, no prime minister who has gone the full distance has survived the subsequent election. There have only been three full five-year parliaments outside of ...”

“... descriptions in Notes of the natural stone bridge over a branch of the James River, and of the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge Mountains, establish the picturesque by means of cunningly juxtaposed evocations of the sublime and the beautiful. (The first of these terms, perhaps because American topography was supposed not to inspire it, is ...”

“... tolerance for the narrative voice, a voice which is startlingly familiar. Here is a representative passage: It suddenly comes to me that I am hungry. Well, perhaps ‘hungry’ is not quite the right word. Bowelwitheringly fucking ravenous might well be a more just and measured phrase to describe what I am currently experiencing. All right, so I’m a young ...”

“... friends. If the aggrieved person is still alive, there is only one remedy: strike out the entire passage. Any friend or acquaintance who turns to the index and does not find his name there can console himself that he was originally the subject of a passage which the lawyer condemned.However, matters have not become as dull ...”

“... some prayers of unsettled authorship, a dramatisation of part of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, admittedly of little interest in itself, and some poems of which the same might be said. The 100-page introduction is lovingly minute in its coverage of early commentary, and the annotations are careful and useful. The performances of the other ...”