“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... he had been estranged. Trollope, as strict in his daily routine as Anny was chaotic, welcomed the young women into his ‘sweet old prim, chill house wrapped in snow’. Tennyson was a close friend, and the Isle of Wight, where Anny and Minny were sheltered by the irrepressible Julia Margaret Cameron, became a lifelong refuge. Anny relished the island ...”

“... badly printed volume of Schiller’s poems becomes the medium through which a Dominican monk, a young Ruthenian village schoolmaster and a poor Jewish boy from a shtetl in what the author bitterly calls ‘Demi-Asia’ (‘Halb-Asien’) find the liberation that the 19th-century version of education and modern culture had to offer. The story culminates in a ...”

“... of mental mapping went back to the medieval chronicles: according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, King Arthur routed the Picts and Scots, and ruled the entirety of Britain, thus underpinning English claims to overlordship of Scotland. But Arthur’s legendary transatlantic northern empire became even more influential on ...”

“... rackety literary man, author of the forgotten epic ‘Orion’, who had been a friend of the young Meredith; and it describes, with that striking domestic vividness of which even the most commonplace Victorians seem to have been capable in their correspondence, a three-week stay recently undergone in the Meredith ménage. It is clear that Catherine Horne ...”

“... with him; but there were always the faithful who remembered and read him, and a few years ago his young man’s trilogy from the early Thirties, Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky, was republished. Personality is important for a cult. The life must be close to the work, and almost but not quite a substitute for it, while the work itself is intimate with ...”

“... One might say that his was either the maddest form of sanity or the sanest form of madness. Arthur Miller called him ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’, in a useful oversimplification. Carl Larsson’s portrait of Strindberg, on the book jacket, essentially in sepia but with rosy lips and penetratingly blue eyes (‘the most beautiful sapphire ...”

“... hatchlings will have something to eat. Except the other way round, the old self feeding off the young one. All that was left would be the eyes, pleading, trapped behind the eyeholes. It’s a rather sophisticated thought for an eight-year-old to have, but then Smith doesn’t play by the rules and might argue, if arguing were her thing, which it ...”

“... editor reproduced a small photograph of a small portrait copied from a very small photograph of a young woman named, so Mossy averred, Nora Joseph Barnacle. A name, I need not tell you, well known by then throughout the world of literature.’ ‘Barnacle?’ said Hunty. ‘But that is a kind of goose.’ ‘Mossy’s story about it was that some ten years ...”

“... anti-Conservative committee-rooms, as happened in the Vale of Glamorgan by-election in May; that Arthur Scargill would be seeking to become a fully-owned subsidiary of Ron Todd? Yet all this has come to pass, and so has industrial action by academics. That is, for me, the saddest development of all. Fashions may change in how best to run an industry or ...”

“... nationalistic stereotyping too little to engage with it. What a strange character is Tennyson’s Arthur in Idylls of the King, for instance: the only Arthur since the 12th century not to be the incestuous father of Mordred, and at the same time the most rigorously de-Celticised and Anglicised figure since Layamon’s. What ...”

“... was, he asserted, the people’s choice. The Times followed up the next day with a hatchet job by Arthur Mizener, entitled ‘Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?’ It was, Parini concludes, ‘a sorry moment for American literary culture’. A friend of the author’s declared himself outraged that ‘Americans weren’t rooting for ...”

“... the baggy pants, is trying to retrieve lost romance (the daft ha’p’orth) by consorting with a young woman who operates a word-processor. It is partly because of her rival’s occupation that Winnie, mistress of the word, or at least of the word inwardly spoken, the phrase rounded in silence as one rolls the pastry or cleans the oven, paradoxically ...”

“... attacked by a storm cloud of pot and BO.’ Another way of saying that the audience is (Gr-rr-r) young. It’s hard to see who made Osborne a writer. In working-class childhoods the Curtis Brown role generally falls to the mother, but not apparently in this case. A colleague of his mother’s, Cheffie, cast him as a future ‘thousand a year man’. This was ...”

“... unburdened by any of our confusion over periodisation, were likewise bewildered: the young Skelton was praised by Caxton for his learning and was the subject of a fulsome panegyric by Erasmus, but later references to him were often hostile. He seems to share common ground with those great humanist proponents of folly, Rabelais and Erasmus ...”