“... overtones, Keynes reports, are driven out when the English arrive supported by the rival forces of Jane Austen: ‘Miss Bates had vanquished Brünnhilde, and Mr Weston’s foot was firmly planted on the neck of Wotan.’ Dr Melchior himself, somewhat to Rosenbaum’s puzzlement, plays little part in the memoir and is entirely absent from The Economic ...”

“... States of Mind, he adopted the classic essayist mode; his splendid occasional pieces on Jane Austen’s novels have some of the dry, delicate precision of their subject. It is part of his strength that this remarkable range is focused chronologically on the first half of the 19th century, so that his knowledge of its literature, for example, informs ...”

“... signs until just before I got to the hotel. The walk had taken nine hours. On CNN Piers Morgan was interviewing the five sons of Mitt Romney, who all have the strange quality of laughing at things that have no potential to be funny. I suppose otherwise they’d never laugh at all. In their biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman ...”

“... In the first volume, on Imperial ‘origins’, there are ground-breaking contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the ...”

“... remain secret even with everybody looking at them.’ Her columns are vivid depictions of what Jane Jacobs called ‘the ballet of the city sidewalk’, but they also display a fascination with the forces that were making that life extinct. In ‘The Last Days of New York City’ (1955), she considers the ‘rumour’ that Robert Moses planned to run ‘an ...”

“... migration, sex work or microcredit. In the old days, the libbers in their rap groups talked about Jane O’Reilly’s notion of the ‘click! of recognition’: the sudden realisation that some nagging problem too dull, too everyday, too basic even to mention was in fact urgent and shared and politically central. Reading Eisenstein’s book, the click! comes ...”

“... of the family, is watched and questioned by his spinster aunt Fanny; the dinner where Eugene Morgan, in love with George’s mother, the last of the Ambersons, sees the truth in a thoughtless insult by George and says that though cars have made his fortune, men may come to think they were something that ‘had no business to be invented’ – all these ...”

“... Wearing. BBC singles and serials both separately developed adaptations of Mansfield Park and Jane Eyre. In fact, as producers ruefully admitted, the upsurge of dramatisations of 19th-century novels was itself a response to ITV’s massively expensive, all-film versions of 20th-century novels such as Brideshead Revisited and Jewel in the Crown in the ...”

“... well have replied by pointing out that he was perfectly happy to have learned his basic craft from Jane Austen rather than Henry James. He maintained that the way to write novels was not to have a complex programme but in each case to do whatever was justified by results. He discusses with civilised humour the questions of story and the plot, allows for the ...”

“... driveway under a full moon, it felt almost comically filmic, a strange technological distortion of Jane Austen’s novels, with character and power waiting to combust. The house loomed through the fog, as they say, and I texted Sarah to say I was two minutes away from the door. The kitchen was the usual thing: blue Aga, double sink, farmhouse table, plates ...”