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“... prototypical dead youth who had sacrificed his life for the Nation. (His funeral was organised by David.) Then, after the fall of Robespierre, there was what Ben-Amos calls Rousseau’s more ‘integrative’ funeral, whose pastoral imagery soothed the crowds as the body made its way from its quiet grave on an island in a country lake to the national shrine ...”

“... first as a friend of Leigh Hunt and then as a friend of Walter Savage Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much ...”

“... The Companion is as pleasurable to browse through as, in another field, the rich pastures of David Thompson’s Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. The impression it leaves – and in this it is itself like some long, densely-plotted Victorian novel – is of a mass of life, work, achievement, suffering, moral uplift and death. Mrs Humphry Ward, for ...”

“... many cases is all that a distressed and confused patient or relative wants. Taylor is followed by Arnold Simanowitz, whose concern is to use the formal complaints channels to obtain evidence for use in court; and by Paul Knapman, an experienced coroner, who describes carefully the powers and procedures of his office – a useful source of evidence for ...”

“... was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of annihilation. Carey plucks a sentence from a letter written in 1915 to Ottoline ...”

“... casts a shadow over his work, Park Honan, already the author of Lives of Jane Austen and Matthew Arnold, doesn’t share the diffidence about the status or value of orthodox literary biography that Schoenbaum’s books seem to betray. Shakespeare: A Life, formally speaking, belongs as unabashedly to an older school of Life-writing as its opening sentence ...”

“... before men had a word for it. How indeed could they have a word for it until it had happened? David Underdown, one of the five big names contributing to this festschrift, has a characteristically wise survey of ‘Community and Class’ in the English Revolution. Disregarding Hexter’s prohibitions, he concludes: ‘The Marxist model of local political ...”

“... commission demanding a reprieve, spearheaded by Arthur Conan Doyle. The signatories included Arnold Bennett, G.K. Chesterton, J.G. Frazer, John Galsworthy, Jerome K. Jerome, John Masefield and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. George Bernard Shaw also petitioned for a pardon – in fact, it would be hard to imagine such a campaign without him. In 1937 he wrote ...”

“... matrix through which East and South see themselves. A strong but representative book like David Dabyeen’s Coolie Odyssey* will go back to The Tempest, Blake and, most evidently, Homer in an effort to come to terms with colonialism. And Derek Walcott has for some years now read ‘Iliads and Odysseys’ (Chatwin’s phrase), Clampitt’s ‘middle of ...”

“... professes an ‘amazement at normality’. Ordinary things can come in many shapes and sizes: when Arnold Bennett shows ‘how important the small and the ordinary are to us’ he is engaged in a slightly different business from Seamus Heaney, whose ‘subject matter was ordinary’, but they might both claim a kind of realism which is the fulfilment of an ...”

“... moment. In The Roaring Queen, Wyndham Lewis saw his mission through, including a caricature of Arnold Bennett under the name of Samuel Shodbutt, here in discussion with his wife: ‘I never read more than the last page. Balzac said he knew what a book was like without even opening it. I can’t say that – that’s more than I can claim – I take off my ...”

“... of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business for you.’) Knowing that Black knew Murdoch socially, my friend asked him if he had ever brought up the subject of the price war. Black shook his head. He ...”

“... Sunday afternoon salon. Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, W.H. Auden, Sergei Eisenstein, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly ...”

“... much heart.Reitlinger devotes a substantial number of pages to Eichmann and concludes, in a phrase David Cesarani quotes, that Eichmann’s ‘career was that of a German civil servant, absorbed in his work and getting no glory for it’. Reitlinger didn’t fail to recognise his significance in the murder of millions of Jews but, like Arendt later on, he ...”

“... be able to take for granted could see for himself or herself the truth of the matter,’ he told David Sexton, somewhat sternly. T.S. Eliot once said that genuine poetry could ‘communicate before it is understood’, though that doesn’t preclude understanding it too: it might seem a generous thing to say that the poetry in some way communicates its ...”