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“... glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster reproduced in Michael Wilkinson and Robert Hamilton’s collection shows the great hulk of the ship, sunlit, belching smoke out of three of its four funnels – the fourth was there only for effect – and cutting a swathe between a small sailing ship and a three-masted square rigger. A sliver of ...”

“... with some of the older children. In Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, Robert Gottlieb quotes the letter in which Dickens explains to his wife what happened: ‘Presently, we heard them come back and say to each other with some alarm: “Why, the gate’s shut, and they are all gone!” Ally began in a dismayed way to cry out, but ...”

“... felt more able to tell the story when she dipped into fiction; in Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) her alter ego, Pompey Casmilus, remembers one of his postcards: ‘“Off to Valparaiso love Daddy.” And a very profound impression of transiency they left upon me.’ Charles was charismatic, absent-minded, wayward (‘could charm the birds off the ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... knows why they happen, and nobody knows how to halt or even satisfactorily slow the degeneration. Robert Will, the neurologist at Western General Hospital in Edinburgh who heads the Government’s CJD surveillance unit, points out that although CJD is rare, we still know a great deal more about it than about many other more common neurological diseases. There ...”

“... sales’ and the second edition, a year later, ‘little or no sales’. But that doesn’t alter the fact that Emerson did his very best to call attention to the book, not only in America but in England. Traubel knows all this, and on several occasions tries to remind Whitman of earlier testimonies to Emerson’s help and past references to Emerson as ...”

“... Hump’ as Bloomsberries called her, was 11 years older than Julia. The astonishing success of Robert Elsmere (1888) made her the second most famous woman in Victorian England. Her poignant saga of a young Anglican priest who defects from the Church to rediscover God in the slums of London sold by the hundred thousand in Britain. In America, unprotected by ...”

“... love for each other was central and permanent: ‘other interests – even other love – cannot alter it.’ Curiously, it seems to have been most threatened, not by illicit sexual attraction, but by Edward’s lack of respect for her socialism and her individuality: a bitter but generalised letter suddenly resolves itself into a particular grudge, at once ...”

“... of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by Elliott ...”

“... comparison with the English poet gives no idea of Magowan’s poetry, nor does this at the end of Robert Peters’s Introduction: ‘I am reminded, finally, of that stunning moment in Alfred Tennyson’s neglected masterpiece “Maud”, where his hero, confronting madness, meditates on the fragility of the human brain, seen via the image of a seashell. Like ...”

“... Britain (how wonderful it would be to substitute ‘high’ for ‘late’!) who uses the Whig alter ego to comment indirectly upon his own time. Rare are such openly expressed sentiments as ‘our age’s preference, in intellectual history, for the subversive and rancorous over the official and self-congratulatory’. Even here, the irony is strong, the ...”

“... debate in academic and cultural life in America. Her subjects range from the attempts to suppress Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs (the famous print of Mapplethorpe with a whip inserted into his anus is reproduced in evidence) to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, to the way the exposé of Paul de Man’s early anti-Semitic writings has been used to ...”

“... per annum, 75 per cent of the EEC total.’ The key word here – for Keiller, as well as his alter ego – is surely ‘project’, just as the key fact is its close juxtaposition with … a fact. The essays in this collection – which Keiller has arranged in chronological order – were written over some thirty years, the ...”

“... to make everything and everyone fit into place – the traditional role of the epic writer. His alter ego Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom thinks about this while driving home in Rabbit, Run (1960): ‘He thinks, My Valley, my home … Every corner locks against a remembered corner in his mind; every crevice, every irregularity in the paint clicks against a nick ...”

“... meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the sex murderers in The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Robert and Caroline, whose actions lead their victim’s girlfriend to surmise that ‘the imagination, the sexual imagination’, embodies ‘a powerful single organising principle’ which distorts ‘all relations, all truth’. The incestuous children in The ...”