“... and custom which inspired those young enthusiasts. We open them beside the solicitor’s clerk, Henry Crabb Robinson, who later recalled: ‘It made me feel more generously. I had never before, nor ... have I ever since felt so strongly the duty of not living to one’s self, but of having for one’s sole duty the good of the community.’ The 1793 edition ...”

“... for almost a century of the Boy’s Own Paper). McAleer also uses the records of Tom Harrisson’s Mass-Observation project, which monitored (among much else) Londoners’ reading habits over the period 1937-46. All publishing history tends towards the condition of statistic and anecdote. McAleer’s book is rich in both departments. The text ...”

“... I understand, more correctly rendered ‘Horn of Antimony’. If there were a Spark Notebook, like Henry James’s, an imaginable entry might run: ‘Suppose that in our time some rich man were not only deep in the study of Job but himself in a situation of – well, shall I say discomfort, interested in the vague analogy between himself and his ...”

“... statements about his work suggest he intended. They were particularly well received in England – Henry Moore spoke of them as his ‘most revelatory experience in modern painting since his youthful discovery of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and the Cubists’. This quick response in England may have owed something to our familiarity with the cloudy sublimities ...”

“... of Perkins’s preferences, the other two are Thom Gunn and C.H. Sisson). In the opposing camp, Tom Paulin provoked an indignant response in this journal in 1985 when he indicted Hill for his reactionary and derivative ‘kitsch feudalism’. Hill’s admirers responded with extreme defensiveness, representing Paulin’s intrusion of politics into the realm ...”

“... and outside, temperate and tropical, man-made and natural. ‘A complex of few interweavings’ is Henry James’s curtly paradoxical summary of the Florida scene. Heavy, stagnant air and violent hurricanes. Paradisiac contentment and accesses of sudden panic. The strange recumbent crescent moons. The deep shadows in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping ...”

“... 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 tears when she saw Louis XVI being taken to his ...”

“... simply: ‘They had no children to complicate the relationship.’ In The Mild Murderer (1977), Tom Cullen writes: ‘Belle had not been long married before it became necessary to remove her ovaries … Even if they had adopted a child it might have made a difference, but they appeared set against this course.’ Not ‘they’, surely. Crippen was the one ...”

“... Most of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at moments ...”

“... of the Spanish Succession. He was outmanoeuvred by his dangerous rival, the Jacobite sympathiser Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and dismissed from office by Anne on 27 July 1714, five days before her death. On George I’s accession he was imprisoned, and acquitted only in July 1717. Just as Crusoe rescues Friday from cannibals, Harley effectively ...”

“... with a large question of the Will coming in, sometimes alarmingly, and particularly interesting to Henry James. In The Bostonians he put this exchange between Olive Chancellor, the intense young spinster, and Verena Tarrant, the easy-going, delightfully Mozartian creature who can be so fervently eloquent at feminist meetings, and who will eventually be carried ...”

“... reflections of America’s legal and religious culture. Hilton Als’s recent essays, The Women, Henry Louis Gates’s Colored People, the reportage of Keith Richburg in Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa square up to the way in which the black individual is the perceived representative of his race, and of ‘being black’; the writers fight ...”

“... of proper Scotland than could ever be accomplished by laws, statesmen or associations,’ wrote Henry Cockburn. After Scott’s death, the most significant literary figure in Edinburgh was not a Scotsman, but the reclusive Thomas de Quincey. Mr Royle treats him to a passing tip of the hat while he evokes the great magazines – as a friend of ‘Christopher ...”

“... to the writing-school circuit as a teacher and collected numerous National Magazine and O. Henry Awards. Each story in his second collection, Pastoralia (2000), was first published in the New Yorker. Saunders’s employment history is worth sketching out because his vision of America and the American workplace could easily be mistaken for something ...”

“... education, did boys enter a more markedly masculine sphere – an experience finely dramatised in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The growing boy is removed from the inadequate female guidance of mother, sisters and nursery-maid, and socialised in the exclusively masculine institution of a public school. Girls, by contrast, remained where they had always been, in ...”