“... the ‘ebb and flow of ordinary existence’. She has in mind the scene in Mansfield Park in which Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price meet on the stairs ‘as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing’. There is more Austen than Joyce in Mrs Dalloway.Woolf’s​ biographer Hermione Lee notes that throughout her adult life ‘the lure of ...”

“... novelists’. He hasn’t lacked champions, starting with Conrad and Eliot, and including Woolf, Edmund Wilson (‘No fiction writer can be read through with a steadier admiration’), Hemingway (‘Turgenev to me is the greatest writer there ever was’) and V.S. Pritchett. But the patchiness with which he is now published and read, and the misconceptions ...”

“... Mary Fiddler, a fine blooming lass of 18, her – is like silk itself, and bubbles as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a well-known gentleman of the turf. Her movements are regular, her pace elegant, and her action is good: and when you mount her, she begins to f—k away to the tune of the ‘Dandy O ...”

“... in 1704. Not all the characters in Colley’s book were captives of foreign powers. Many were poor white underlings, caught up against their will or inclination in the steady expansion of the Empire. Take the case of Sarah Shade, an agricultural servant from Herefordshire who, in 1769, fled to India with her stepfather (who may also have been her lover). She ...”

“... their demise, and when, in ‘Among the Roman Gravemounds’, he wrote the line ‘That little white cat was his only friend,’ she found it ‘too much even for my sweet temper’. Yet in ‘Last Words to a Dumb Friend’, written when Snowdove ‘met his death’ (as Seymour-Smith grandiloquently puts it) on the railway line in 1904, Hardy transcends ...”

“... Known Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother and father died of Spanish flu in 1918 on the train on which the ...”

“... charm that fascinated Henry James and all those other competent Late Victorians (Sidney Colvin, Edmund Gosse, Charles Baxter) who worried interminably about the great question, ‘what to do with Louis?’ Perhaps they need not have worried. ‘Thin legged! thin-chested!’ Louis revealed considerable ability to look after himself and boss others in his ...”

“... that the American Civil War would not have taken place.’ Johnson manages to ignore the work of Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis and numerous other scholars of the past thirty years who have demonstrated that slavery was an intrinsic element of American life almost from the beginning of the colonial era, and that it imparted a powerful exclusionary ...”

“... wear the ‘absurdly uncomfortable’ clothes into which the Victorian child was squeezed, the ‘white piqué starched frocks’ and the velvet hair ribbons ‘fastened with a bit of elastic looped over a button behind the ear’ that was so tight it gave her a headache. Difficulties with clothes occur in many of her books. Peter Rabbit’s expression of ...”

“... and ambition might be enough in themselves to propel the humblest of citizens from log cabin to White House is a vital ingredient in the American Dream. Indeed, it has served as a powerful anaesthetic against the inequalities of American society. But for how much longer? A rampant dynasticism – verging on royalism – threatens the efficacy of this ...”

“... recent vampire craze. The romantic interest would be a sulky boy called something like Darren or Edmund who was secretly a vampire or a werewolf, and not so secretly attracted to the weird chick. By the end of the story, they had kissed.The OED defines fan fiction as ‘fiction, usually fantasy or science fiction, written by a fan rather than a professional ...”

“... of Kemal Ataturk, the struggles in Germany between left and right before the Nazis took over, the White Russian diaspora in Paris and Berlin, and the energetically anti-semitic immigration procedures adopted by the United States to keep out Jews trying to flee from Hitler’s Europe. Informative though several of these essays are, they do mischief to the ...”

“... sort of plot and the two men were buried alongside each other and their graves marked by plain white marble slabs bearing just their names and dates. Family photographs show both graves strewn with wreaths and flowers and Alfred’s headstone has an ornate wire frame fixed behind it, covered with more flowers. Amelia and Albert were the only mourners at ...”

“... is ‘naturalising’. Nature has served as a revolutionary concept in its day, while from Edmund Burke to Michael Oakeshott the notion of culture has been for the most part a conservative one. When the political regimes of 18th-century Europe heard the word nature, they reached for their cultural privileges. The notion that everything is ...”

“... implicitly (and sometimes, in my experience, explicitly) favour submission to Providence. Edmund Burke and Brexitists ought not to agree on much, but Brexitists do seem to share Burke’s belief that ‘the awful Author of our Being is the Author of our place in the order of existence … Having disposed and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not ...”