“... Austen’s more outrageous witticisms come together, as he points out, shortly after the death of Thomas Fowle: Cassandra, he suggests, may have needed a sort of epistolary shock treatment. When Honan enters upon psychological speculation, however, the results are mostly conventional. The shy girl is ill at ease with strangers, finds security in her ...”

“... of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John ...”

“... Similarly, it is hard not to detect the verdict of moral absurdity in his account of R.S. Thomas as ‘primarily a religious poet, tormented by a sense of God’s absence, and berating his parishioners for using refrigerators, washing machines, and other modern evils’, or of air-headedness in his remark that Mrs Yeats’s ability to hear spirit ...”

“... in Latin, licentia. This sort of freedom has descended to us via the plea to the king from Thomas More when he was Speaker of the House of Commons that every MP should enjoy the liberty ‘freely … and boldly to declare his advice’ – a privilege that survives today in the liberty of MPs to utter words in the chamber which, if repeated ...”

“... to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from ...”

“... trunked and bikinied masses. ‘Britannia Roused, or the Coalition Monsters Destroyed’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1784). In the election of October 1974, Wilson got a bare majority, with 319 seats, but still lacked a clear mandate. Yet the country, it turned out, was less divided than it appeared. In 1975 there was a referendum on continuing membership ...”

“... run over by Stephenson’s Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830. Thomas Love Peacock, who found a pleasant berth at the India Board after writing Nightmare Abbey, began to investigate the possibilities of navigating the Euphrates from the Gulf to northern Syria – the India mail already went that way, but by land. James ...”

“... of frivolity,’ he wrote, ‘they look like wandering jesters.’ The 12th-century theologian Hugh of St Victor echoed this idea in a popular work on the education of novices, arguing that the discipline that regulates the movement of the limbs also ‘quells all the disorderly impulses of the mind’. The aim of such teaching was to form an individual in ...”

“... chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the ...”

“... of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and Maitland’s famous essay on ‘Memoranda de Parliamento 1305’ calls ...”

“... the Joyce story ‘Eveline’. The most satisfying account of this story that I have read comes in Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, and is properly mindful of Joyce’s Dublin knowingness. ‘Eveline’ opens with a perfectly felicitous and unobtrusive metaphor: ‘She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.’ McCormack gets his teeth into ...”

“... almost exclusively at the power politics of theocracy, except for a few eccentrics such as Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty. Theocratic failure and national defeat took place before the first signs of intellectual innovation. The most interesting 17th-century forerunner of the 18th-century efflorescence is Stair, whose Institutions captivate by their simple ...”

“... and suddenly Smith was the epigone of ‘hysterical realism’, the misbegotten progeny of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie. When he repeated the charge in the Guardian after the 11 September attacks, she responded that the term was ‘painfully accurate’, and mounted a defence of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, as if the prescriptive ...”

“... of this world, readers of lyric poems live in a parallel universe along with Fotherington-Thomas and his flowers and birds. But Culler is no aesthete. In a final chapter he explores how the curious temporal status of lyric can give it a utopian force, as a form that evokes possible other worlds. Poems of praise can create imaginary communities, which ...”

“... of others’ work is low, especially by American standards, and with the single exception of Hugh Kenner no practising fellow academic earns the accolade of even approaching classic status. Ricks’s sympathy and magnanimity, two great ‘principles’ of his criticism (of which more anon), are reserved here for the dead. Ricks does indeed appreciate, as ...”