“... for performance. The history of the essay – from Hazlitt on his first acquaintance with poets to Orwell on the sex life of the common toad – is the history of writers taking a break from other forms in order, not to ask themselves que sais-je? but simply to strut their stuff. Hardly anybody has done that to better effect than Gore Vidal, whose essays are ...”

“... better known and loved than Forster himself, though here having to answer to the first name ‘George’, perhaps by contamination from the actor George Arliss, once, but no longer, famous. In discussing the contents of the book it might be best to begin by disposing of Appendix A, which is devoted to 11 poems, mostly ...”

“... Rocker and any anti-Bolshevik Marxists he could find. He also managed to find a British edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which wasn’t published in the US until after the Second World War. Orwell celebrated the anarchists in Barcelona, who had been opposed by both the Americans and the Soviets. Struck by the ...”

“... In October 2011, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that George Soros had violated insider trading laws more than two decades ago in dealings with the French bank Société Générale. Soros has given billions of his personal wealth to fund liberal political organisations, notably his own Open Society Foundations, which operate on a global scale and have supported anti-totalitarian movements from Poland’s Solidarity to Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change, as well as countless other organisations that promote human rights ...”

“... chips as by roast beef. He might have added that the ‘sandal-wearing vegetarians’ scorned by Orwell are almost as recognisably English a type as the beef-gobbling John Bull. He might have compared the English beef fetish to those of other nations – Argentina, say, or Japan, with its beloved Kobe cattle. He would have inquired closely into the diet of ...”

“... Faith in Europe seems to be another area in which Stonehouse’s idealism has died. According to Orwell, if most novel reviewers were honest they would have to say: ‘I have no thoughts whatsoever about this novel.’ Had Ralph been written anonymously, it would be a nullity. As it is, one reads it, almost hating oneself, for the piquancy of passages like ...”

“... Inimitable. In his essay on Dickens, remarkable for its combination of admiration and perplexity, Orwell points out that for all Dickens’s generous involvement in social issues and endless speeches at charity dinners, there’s little representation or understanding of the world of work in his novels, or of the working class; the characters are intensely ...”

“... of Tariff Reform was, or that Free Trade Unionism had nothing to do with the TUC, or how Lloyd George dished Asquith in 1915 and 1916, the sections of the book dealing with how the press treated these things will be incomprehensible. Koss has no time to stop and help you. Matters become easier as the book approaches the present day. This is partly, of ...”

“... been led to expect insights a little sharper than those on show here. This story of Margery and George Ince, living in Rome, where George is employed by some sort of multinational philanthropic and acronymic organisation, falls into the same painless slot as Nancy Mitford’s Don’t Tell Alfred. The story turns on the ...”

“... and impressive that ‘Dent was willing to invest in so many lengthy and intimidating classics: George Grote’s History of Greece in 12 volumes, Hakluyt’s Voyages . . . in eight, J.A. Froude’s History of England in ten, 15 volumes of Balzac and six of Ibsen.’ No less impressive was the stamina and catholicity of the implied Everyman reader, and the ...”

“... The cool, courteous Alexander Kinglake and the hot, contentious George Borrow are two of the best-liked and most influential travel writers of the 19th century. They were contemporaries for much of their long lives (Borrow died in 1881, aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination ...”

“... I’ve always had a soft spot for George III, starting all of forty years ago when I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions ...”

“... and Cruikshank and Trollope, a slew of Americans and a galaxy of European stars from Balzac and George Sand to Turgenev and Musil, is to leave this reader at least stunned with admiration for the sympathy, originality and fresh turn of phrase constantly shown. Just as the short story is the ideal length for Pritchett as creative writer, so the longish ...”

“... pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form of ...”

“... of England and the old Empire to talk freely to mad old Indians. Change involved the right of George Bernard Shaw to say that the long lying-in-state of the dead queen was a danger to public health, and for the slow emergence of figures such as D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster, who would dramatise in novels the end of restriction and the beginning of new ...”