“... brother defeated the British, and forced their cocky commander – a 22-year-old Virginian named George Washington – to sign an embarrassing confession that nearly brought his promising military career to an end. War was on with a vengeance, and French propagandists exploited the incidents for all they were worth, pummelling the English as ...”

“... long she had moved to Paris too and was living with Barney and Vivien. De Pougy married Prince George Ghika, after which she only allowed Barney to touch her from the waist up.The daisy chain continued to get longer: in 1901 Olive Custance – who eventually eloped with Lord Alfred Douglas – had affairs with both Barney and Vivien. A year later Vivien ...”

“... and bureaucracy, controversially paid for by raiding the Chancery suitors’ funds. The architect George Street, whose last major job it was, had to deal with a building firm which, inevitably, had been selected by the Treasury solely because it was the lowest bidder and which, just as inevitably, went bust after the first phase, leaving subcontractors unpaid ...”

“... 15 blocks north); and Kazin’s apartment at 111th Street is said to be conveniently close to the George Washington Bridge, which is in fact at 186th Street and nearby only to a fanatical walker like Kazin. These are extremely minor things but they lead you to wonder whether Cook has ever been to New York. Similarly, he doesn’t seem that curious about ...”

“... she is far more excited by renunciation and by the struggles of Florence Nightingale or Sophia Jex-Blake than by the achievements of her own generation. With its fear that ‘the victims of the patriarchal system’ might become the new ‘champions of the capitalist system’, Three Guineas tries to envisage a psychic and emotional space in which those who ...”

“... even if they did not encourage him in his deviant designs. Among his colleagues at the BBC were George Orwell and Louis MacNeice, both of whom he greatly admired; and there were others, their names by now probably forgotten, who brought conviction and real knowledge to Empson’s side of the fight. One such, Ralf Bonwit, a formidable, dedicated Japanese ...”

“... there are moments when we fall into what can feel like a bottomless pit. Bunyan, like Milton and Blake, is one of the guides we may summon when we find ourselves taking that plunge. Perhaps it is unfair to expect a critic to identify with Bunyan’s dream of truth, but Michael Davies’s lengthy study is remarkable for its failure to empathise with ...”

“... and Goethe that is Hellas, and remains, even through a sequence of undistinguished poems on George Eliot and Dorothy Wordsworth, haunted by the genius loci. There are poems about Venice and London. New Providence claims attention. But Greece exerts the strongest pull, a centripetal appeal. Olympia, Thermopylae, Dodona, Hippocrene: there’s a roll and ...”

“... Civil War, and that Robert Burns mattered perhaps more than Cobbett and certainly more than Blake to the Northern English working class of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine and Cobbett are left out of the story. The land, England within its ...”

“... and even for some a kind of personal cross. Of the leading German Marxist thinkers, only George Lukacs had (immediately) chosen Moscow; and there he was to remain until the end of the Second World War, true to the party he had joined in 1918 and apparently at one with the Stalinist consequences of the Leninism to which he had fully committed himself ...”

“... suppose I could have been a drunk.One used to see Bacon quite often, as he was a regular guest at George Melly’s across the road. The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine ...”

“... and had no domestic attachments to fulfil or distract him. In the 1970s, the Tory historian Robert Blake dismissed speculation on his sexuality with the testy claim that he was simply one of those men who find getting married too much hassle. Rhodes would probably not have declared himself a homosexual, if he had known the word: he did not need to, living on ...”

“... Philip Roth and William Styron had pinned up above their desks a famous Flaubert aphorism, which Blake Bailey quotes in his Roth biography: ‘Be orderly and regular in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be wild and original in your work.’ It is a wonderful, uplifting quote, even if the translation seems to be a little adapted. ‘Violent’ or ...”

“... to touch on only briefly. The book is extremely fine. But it slightly lacks the element of what Blake called ‘mental fight’; its romance is only just not mood music (the touching absurdity of the fall at Lyme Regis has its place in this). Conceivably a symptom of that sense of defeat in life which may psychosomatically have induced Austen’s fatal ...”

“... jumble concocted largely from letters she had written to her sisters and to Fanny’s brother George, suggests the need to prepare young women to make their own way, but it cannot quite reject the social conservatism that Wollstonecraft would continue to find intermittently attractive all her life: her prescriptions are tame and include (among other ...”