“... burrows in every direction. Huge tunnelling monsters summon up the Megalosaurus referenced by Dickens, at the dawn of the first railway age, in the opening of Bleak House, ‘waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. Mere ‘foot passengers’ struggle through the rain to their places of employment, adding ‘new deposits to the crust upon ...”

“... irony which makes a joke of the self-pity at the same time – as when he characterises himself to Charles Monteith, his worldly editor at Faber and Faber, as a ‘simple ploughboy from the north’, which he certainly wasn’t. In his bouncy Memoirs of the Forties (1965), Julian Maclaren-Ross offers a memorable portrait of Graham brooding over his pint, a man ...”

“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... lasting damage.In 1972, just before his seventieth birthday, after finishing Maigret and Monsieur Charles and without premeditation, Simenon stopped writing fiction. As with the other big decisions in his life, moving house or indeed moving country, he didn’t overthink it. He just knew that he was done. After that came the fifth phase, in which he dictated ...”

“... of greater clarity, cogency and simplicity, he compares a passage from Our Mutual Friend, in which Dickens gives an amusing description of the Veneering family, Mr Podsnap and others in the Veneering dining room, with an account of a bad railway collision at Harrow in l952 and finds the 20th-century passage more cogent, lucid and precise. He might have added ...”

“... writing on Shakespeare, there are wonderful remarks on Don Quixote, extraordinary essays on Byron, Dickens, Ibsen, Frost, Marianne Moore, D.H. Lawrence; but when Auden wants to evoke ‘a parable of agape’, or ‘Holy Love’, he talks about Bertie Wooster’s relation to Jeeves. Bertie in his blithering is a comic model of humility, and his reward is ...”

“... is the epicentre of the Comédie humaine, but Balzac’s world in no way stops there, as that of Dickens does in London. Equally memorable are his depictions of Saumur, Angoulême or Tours. In Stendhal and Flaubert, the narratives of Le Rouge et le noir and Madame Bovary depend on Besançon and Rouen. In the 20th century, cinema has relayed the ...”

“... 1820. By this point, only around eighty American novels had been published, and the best known was Charles Brockden Brown’s macabre Edgar Huntley (1799), although Washington Irving’s collection of short stories and vignettes, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., would prove immensely popular the year Smith made his jibe. (Like Cooper after ...”

“... Divided Self. I remember it because it stuck out a bit beside the Edwardian set of the novels of Charles Dickens, picked up at a jumble sale or second-hand shop, and the books we actually read, stories by Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner and Agatha Christie. When my eldest sister went to Birmingham University to study English in the mid 1970s the ...”

“... have understood what Kala was getting at in remembering and resenting her mother’s durance vile. Dickens for one, with his mixed feelings about philanthropy. Naipaul’s ‘solitariness’ is apparent both in his first India book and in this one, but to different degrees. In this one, it largely disappears into the reigning self-effacement. In the first, he ...”

“... anything else a pitiable people.’ However, the ‘Radical working man’ came along, supported Charles Bradlaugh and went on to found the Labour Party. ‘The men of 1946’, Cole and Postgate concluded, were cleverer still – look at how their earnest quest for information had forced their oppressors to ‘improve’ the technique of ‘deluding the ...”

“... the ending of A Handful of Dust, when we meet the illiterate man in the Brazilian jungle who loves Charles Dickens’s writing so much he holds the protagonist, Tony Last, captive so that he can read Dickens to him until the end of his days. Sometimes I thought of Stach as the captive and Kafka as the captor in this ...”

“... Office, Hazel Blears. With a name that combines both blur and smear and which would have delighted Dickens the lady in question has always shown herself to be an unwavering supporter of Mr Blair, though lacking those gestures in the direction of humanity with which her master generally lards his utterances. 12 March. A cold bright day in Yorkshire and I sit ...”

“... includes so many kinds of the good, and why the really great writers – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens – manage to include nearly all of them (Socrates argued that the truly good writer ought to be able to do both tragedy and comedy, but most of the few cases in point wrote in English). Because of this complexity of literature written in English, easy ...”

“... in the Great War had ‘exploited to the utmost’ the American love of ‘Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, Magna Carta’, and that those of ‘Anglo-Saxon stock’ like herself had felt an ‘intensity of feeling for the people from which they sprang’, which had been misplaced. But this war was different: Americans needed to send aid to Britain, not for ...”