“... suitable for all the contradictory fantasies and hallucinations that the author wishes to convey. Emma Tennant’s Wild Nights is the most ambitious and the most exciting of these four novels. It gives us reality through the five senses of a child narrator, and is not so much fantasy as a witch’s eye view of the world. ‘I waited for the night journey over ...”

“... In the summer of 2007, Jay Smith, who teaches history at the University of North Carolina, was in Paris collecting information for a book about a mysterious beast that terrorised the remote French province of the Gévaudan between 1764 and 1767. One day, while lunching on the place de la Sorbonne, he was warned of a terrible danger ...”

“... the Scots invented Thatcherism, long before I was thought of.’ The Scot she meant was Adam Smith, a figure popularly identified as the founder of economics, an apostle of capitalism and honoured prophet of the new right. It was exasperating for Thatcher, and a pleasing irony for her opponents, that the nation of Adam ...”

“... a squire) of the order of St Jane’. In 1949, after writing two books about Austen, Sheila Kaye-Smith had a conversation with her about electric lamps and radios. Inevitably there have been squabbles over whose Austen is the real one. Lionel Trilling warned the new reader of her novels that ‘Jane Austen is to be for him not only a writer but an issue ...”

“... the treatment meted out by the medical profession to the young shell-shock victim Septimus Warren Smith, Clarissa’s dark double: insanity to her sanity, death to her life. In the novel, the cold fury climaxes in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ...”

“... sexism in Gargantua and Pantagruel, and to Jane Austen’s complicity with male authority in Emma, works he has long loved and admired. The reconsiderations of Rabelais, Austen and Twain, however, are only a part of a larger enterprise to rehabilitate the nearly lost practice of ethical criticism. There is no single account of why ethical criticism has ...”

“... from 1660 – this is omitting foreign authors, pseudonymous characters like ‘Captain Alexander Smith’, and others whose masculinity may be nominal. It would be rash to expect all these to qualify for Spender’s epithet ‘good’. But if Ann Emelinda Skinn and M. Peddle (two of Dale’s hundred best tunes) deserve a place in the record, it is not ...”

“... Randolph in The Holdovers; best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr in Oppenheimer; best actress, Emma Stone in Poor Things; best actor, Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers; best director, Christopher Nolan for Oppenheimer. Best Picture? The word was out before Christmas, it will be Oppenheimer. There’s your big six. Now get a life. When he wins (with his wife ...”

“... private life that Hardy keeps under wraps – we hear next to nothing of his unhappy marriage with Emma, for example, or his recurrent infatuations with pretty literary women, or the effect of his mentor Horace Moule’s suicide at Queen’s College, Cambridge; there’s no mention of his mother’s early life as one of seven children brought up on parish ...”

“... women in these fictions do tend to take over each other – the archetype would be Jane Austen’s Emma taking over Harriet Smith – as if the maternal role had in this new context got out of hand. ‘George Egerton’, the intense but somewhat clumsy author of an intriguingly named novel, The Spell of the White Elf ...”

“... that it’s difficult to agree when the series of murders began. The killing in April 1888 of Emma Elizabeth Smith was probably a street robbery and gang-rape, but is sometimes reckoned as the first of the Whitechapel murderer’s crimes. The murder on 7 August of Martha Tabram is attributed by some to an unidentified ...”

“... that this process may already be under way. Jonathan Raban’s Foreign Land and Black Marina by Emma Tennant are, from the formal standpoint, very different kinds of novel, but they share, quite strikingly, an un-English pre-occupation with the problem for the individual of belonging in the modern state. Jonathan Raban is a distinguished travel writer and ...”

“... have been spared needless agony. An equally famous suicide in literature is similarly botched. Emma Bovary steals arsenic from the pharmacist’s locked cupboard with the vague sense that as a rat poison it must be fast and certain. The result is a day-long agony during which she vomits blood and screams curses at the poison she has injudiciously ...”

“... liberal-humanist intellectuals and nobody was any longer interested in how to combine Adam Smith with the Bible, or the rule of the many with the wisdom of the few. Yet literature gives back what history has erased. In fact literature – Galsworthy, Woolf, Waugh, Wodehouse, Nancy Mitford, Compton-Burnett – has made this Victorian hybrid, the ...”

“... Henry Raeburn’s ‘John Johnstone, Betty Johnstone and Miss Wedderburn’ (c.1790-95). Emma Rothschild has a written a strange, immensely thoughtful book which at first glance ought to complement Devine’s work. But it does nothing of the sort, attending instead to the history of sensibilities rather than of nations. It is based on the lives and ...”