“... to get me off her hands. She wrote once or twice later to say that she was going out with a very nice Italian in the restaurant business. The picture told of a tall, dark man in his thirties, smiling at the camera with my mother behind it. In another letter she asked if I’d had any Valentine cards. She’d had ten. No, I said. I hadn’t had ...”

“... with any people upon mean conditions; if you will entertain this virgin, you must act upon the nice principles of honour and without any respect to parties – if this is not observed, credit will not come; no, though the Queen should call; though the Parliament should call, or though the whole Nation should call. When Daniel Defoe, the world’s first ...”

“... and though the subject failed to catch the attention of George Orwell, it might have been a nice thing if it had, given its place in England’s emotional life at every level and in every class. Orwell was an old Etonian, so he knew all about that, but he also spent a certain amount of time in the vicinity of Wigan Pier, where a succession of drag ...”

“... to insist on his greatness? Because Coleridge isn’t in this book, in the way that he isin Richard Holmes’s recent, sensitive profile in the Oxford ‘Past Masters’ series. Does a study like Levere’s miss some point, or is one merely making an obvious remark about the difference between ‘biography’ and ‘intellectual history’? Authors and ...”

“... know next to nothing about the major Victorian publishers who were his partners. An exception is Richard Bentley, whose publishing career was extensively dealt with in Royal Gettmann’s A Victorian Publisher. There are objections to Peter Mann’s attempt to flatten out the distinction between literary and non-literary books. So, too, are there objections ...”

“... Franklin, Henry Fuseli, William Godwin, Mary Hays, William Hazlitt, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Charlotte Smith, John Horne Tooke, Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as well as a number of theologians and religious controversialists, of writers on science and medicine and so on, whose names were then ...”

“... to the past. We don’t need Marvell’s satires or his constituency correspondence (though it’s nice to know they existed) to love his poems – a proposition with which Croft may disagree. The only strictly poetic claim in his introduction is for ‘an extraordinary consistency of vision and voice and feeling’ which shares six features: that Swingler was ...”

“... Sun, which hadn’t even been under investigation. Among the first officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie ...”

“... fall’, and she was not alone in finding in him an innocence of the world that lay about him.As Richard Holmes’s 1974 biography showed with such intelligence and affection, Shelley was fully aware of his reputation for being away with the fairies and became brilliantly adept at playing along with it, often to seductive effect; but it wasn’t just an ...”

“... She sent her stories out on a Tuesday and received her rejections by Friday for years, until Richard Crossman, who had become editor of the New Statesman in 1970 after six years in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, liked one of them enough to buy several in 1972. With her first cheque for writing, she bought the children sausages and chips for dinner, like the ...”

“... barbarian woman with knowledge of hexes and potions, she ought to be monstrous, other and not very nice, but Apollonius makes her sympathetic, a victim more than a victimiser, who gradually comes to terms with the fact that she is being used and hardens her heart accordingly. The object of her affections is unworthy of them, a rather ordinary man eclipsed by a ...”

“... still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ecstasies of annihilation. Carey plucks a sentence from a letter ...”

“... freedom of register was partly a result of his squirearchical background: he was a descendant of Richard Empson, a loathed minister of Henry VII, and grew up in a manor house in Yorkshire. He read maths and then English in the Cambridge of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, but the biggest influence on him was his supervisor, I.A. Richards, who advocated ...”

“... reality receives the occasional anguished acknowledgment in the letters. ‘You kindly say it is nice to have a 2nd home,’ Fitzgerald wrote to her daughter Maria in 1974. ‘I wonder if you feel you have a 1st one! But we love you very much and that must count for something.’ To Carduff in 1987 she remarked that ‘on the whole I think you should write ...”

“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”