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“... once told his son that he couldn’t imagine learning a new language in order to write a book, as Edmund Wilson had done. The achievement of this biography is to have restored ‘Dwight’, as Wreszin calls him, to his proper place as the guardian and transmitter of a noble lineage of dissent, as the author of some essays that will be read for longer than ...”

“... with a large round head going bald down the forehead. A pigmy waxed moustache too small for the white upper lip, a round and rather long chin. Pale and hollow between nose and cheeks, and bright, colourless, vain eyes. Those eyes he opens wide when he looks and smiles at a woman. A drawling voice and a sneer at the right [‘left’ crossed out] corner of ...”

“... And while the audience may be granted a knowledge of Iago’s plots, or the true nature of Edmund and Macbeth, superior to that of any of the characters on stage, this knowledge is scarcely the guarantee of a happy ending. To do him justice, Evans does pause briefly midway through Shakespeare’s Tragic Practice to ask himself the crucial question. The ...”

“... criticism has overemphasised the racial issue in the play. Nevertheless, the contrast between white and black skin matters more than she allows, if only because it is, on stage, the visually inescapable and culminating disparity between Othello and Desdemona. As such, it goes on reminding us of the special and atypical character of their love: the risks ...”

“... that’s gone wrong with the book. Still, the book has much to recommend it. Its consideration of Edmund Burke is exhaustive. Burke, one of the 18th-century figures whose apotheosis was ordained by Yeats, has lately been attracting the attention of academics like McCormack and Seamus Deane, both of whom have written about him in The Crane Bag. Burke’s ...”

“... for writing in the style of the Ladies’ Home Journal, dismissed by modernist-minded critics like Edmund Wilson, and accused in 1933 by Granville Hicks, a ubiquitous critic then in his Marxist phase, of falling ‘into a supine romanticism because of a refusal to examine life as it is’. She received buckets of mail from priests who saw themselves in Death ...”

“... sublime emotions. In her Original Sonnets on Various Subjects (1799), Anna Seward quoted a ‘Mr White’ from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1786 who said ‘the style of the sonnet should be nervous, and, where the subject will with propriety bear elevation, sublime.’ Mary Robinson (described by Coleridge as ‘a woman of undoubted genius’, but perhaps ...”

“... epitaph on William the Silent: ‘When he cried, the little children died in the streets.’ Edmund Burke was accused by Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine of putting it on in his lament for Marie Antoinette, but Burke protested that he had wept as he wrote and that the tears had ‘wetted my paper’. In any case, Wollstonecraft herself had been moved to ...”

“... attended a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research, then overseen by Frederic W.H. Myers and Edmund Gurney, observing to her mother that she had found the proceedings ‘a very dull business, consisting mainly of avowals of failed experiments. Gurney looks weary and embittered. The rest singularly water on the brain.’Lee was hardly suited to writing ...”

“... my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were long, sometimes fulsome, always affectionate, and full of great table talk and funny ...”

“... legitimate daughter would not have married a man like Evans, so was she perhaps a mulatto, with a white planter for a father and a black African mother? Though Milbourne’s family were good at documenting themselves, she seems to have slipped through their net. Her memorial tablet in a church in Kent described her simply as ‘a good Christian wife and ...”

“... I do not resent it. I look upon it as very natural.’ In the face of attacks from the likes of Edmund Wilson (who called him ‘a half-trashy novelist who writes badly, but is patronised by half-serious readers who do not care much about writing’), Maugham could, and did, point to his supersized audience, implying that you’d have to be very serious ...”

“... the Crown. Psychological boundaries came into existence, to reinforce the physical ones – the ‘White’ and ‘Black’ town – that were already there. The social and racial structure of the India Kipling was born in and later returned to as a journalist was determined by the Mutiny and, later, by the defeat of the Ilbert Bill, which would have given ...”

“... with their daughter, Harriet, Lowell began seeing a young poetry student who looked, according to Edmund Wilson, ‘like a Renoir’. On one occasion, the girl played hostess at their house in Boston, while Hardwick retreated upstairs to cry. Bishop cut short a visit in the summer of 1947 after Lowell began declaring that he was in love with her. When the ...”

“... debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture ...”