“... Aunt Eveline arranges herself on the piano stool and with my father on the violin (‘Now then, Walter, what shall we give them?’) kicks off with a selection from Glamorous Night. Then, having played themselves in, they accompany Uncle George, my father’s brother, in some songs. Uncle ...”

“... than in his determination to build an alternative secular society. It was his predecessor George Jacob Holyoake who coined the term ‘secularism’ – ‘the province of the real, the known, the useful and the affirmative’ – in the year of the Great Exhibition, and it was not the least of the achievements of the age. But it was Bradlaugh ...”

“... the petit bourgeois milieu to which he belonged and which is her special province as a novelist. George Steiner, in his short novel or novella (cut for publication in the Cambridge magazine Granta), returns us to the black-red-white formulaic fiction, in which the aged Hitler is tracked down in the swamps of South America by an Israeli search party whipped ...”

“... First, sort out your Scotts. George Gilbert Scott (1811-78), hereafter Sir Gilbert, designed the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office and the tumultuous cliff of a hotel that shields St Pancras Station. A spiteful ditty, summing up the Victorian business of church restoration, also accounted him first among ‘the earnest band that spoiled half the churches in the land ...”

“... to his unusual capacity for suffering in the service of a transcendent Art. No wonder he told George Sand as he set out on the novel that it would be the modern ‘counterpart’ of Saint Antoine (the final version of which he had just sent off to the publisher). He is reverting in Bouvard et Pécuchet to the role of St Anthony, with the prolonged ascesis ...”

“... with a short story in the Churchman’s Companion. In the same year there was an awed meeting with George Eliot in Pattison’s house. But George Eliot was not the woman that Mary Arnold wanted to be. She was learned enough for anyone, but her unsanctioned union with Lewes meant that she was hardly respectable. As ...”

“... I was surprised to come upon a sustained and in my view immoderate onslaught on the late Eric Walter White, who, during Goodman’s chairmanship, was Literature Director at the Arts Council and its much admired organiser of festivals. I worked with White for some years, and he was certainly a strange and almost risibly affected man, but he was also ...”

“... an injustice by her ‘much-quoted remark’ that her motive had been to gain as much publicity as George Sand, who had scandalised Chamonix by turning up in her ‘ideologically significant male garb, accompanied by a youth dressed as a woman’. In her book Henriette’s explanation runs to waffle: ‘The soul has needs, as does the body, peculiar to each ...”

“... A ‘blacksmith’ (village) is or was an actor who seldom got long engagements – a failure. ‘George Spelvin’, like Harry Selby and Walter Plinge, is the fictitious name used in the cast-list for an actor who has already appeared in another part. If the character dies in the course of the play ‘...”

“... a peculiarly heart-sore quality. We call our migrations ‘exile’ (a chapter-heading in George Marshall’s lucid and thorough study of Edwin Muir’s native culture), although the individual choice is usually our own. As Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters, ‘I do not know if I desire to live there, but let me hear in some far land a ...”

“... Walter Benjamin once remarked that what drove men and women to revolt was not dreams of liberated grandchildren but memories of oppressed ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well; but happiness is a feeble, holiday-camp kind of word, resonant of manic grins and multicoloured jackets, not least when compared with the kind of past which, as Marx commented, weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living ...”

“... mostly fairies, twittering all over the place, screaming “Oh, Lionel!” ’ This may make George Orwell seem rather naive for having made the otherwise useful observation that: ‘how closely Wodehouse sticks to conventional morality can be seen from the fact that nowhere in his books is there anything in the nature of a sex joke. This is an enormous ...”

“... medical records don’t record any symptoms of the disease). In the view of the psychoanalyst Walter Langer, who reported to the American secret service during the war on ‘the mind of Adolf Hitler’, he was a sadomasochist who projected his sexual perversions onto the world stage. A later German attempt to analyse his personality concluded that Hitler ...”

“... to point out the ‘tragic heart’ of Glasgow’s hellish industrial reality and set it against Walter Scott’s ‘ain romantic toon’, the Edinburgh of magical hallucinations and historical fantasies. In that sense the argument between Scotland’s two biggest cities – and most of it resides in jokes – is little more than an enjoyable clash between ...”

“... the clip is a unit of communication in itself, like a gag or an anecdote or a bit of graffiti. Walter Benjamin imagined an ideal book consisting of nothing but quotes. A conversation made up entirely of quotes was always more likely, but the internet has made possible for everyone a feat that previously could have been managed only by two people with ...”