“... of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom’. Hall thinks – what might at first glance appear paradoxical – that he ...”

“... sanitarily and commercially. He raised money for a fashionable chapel by George Gilbert Scott as well as new boarding houses, decently appointed and, from the mid-1850s, complete with water closets. He promoted an Arnoldian style of religious and moral education, centred on his own weekly sermon. And most important of all, for ultimately it was ...”

“... once-great names with scant ceremony, interpreting Fielding as too like his own Squire Western, Scott as a mere Border balladeer. Richardson and Dickens, though allowed some merit, were kept out of the limelight. Even within the oeuvres of the favoured George Eliot, James and Conrad, Leavis went in for a further process ...”

“... ages. In the course of this account Kafka is shown to anticipate Sartre’s protest in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? of 1948 against the finished, fully rounded story and the omniscient narrator who makes such an ending possible and thus falsifies (Sartre argues) ‘what happens in real life’. Following the chronology of Kafka’s stories (he leaves ...”

“... new demand caught him between wind and water: he was ‘more disposed’ anyway, as he told Walter Scott, ‘to instruct & admonish mankind than to amuse them’. One might pardon the versatility if only it pardoned itself less copiously; but Southey always had an exceptional gift for ingratiating himself with himself. ‘I have a trick of thinking too well of ...”

“... to ‘British and Irish Authors’, a high-quality series which includes Patrick Parrinder on James Joyce and John Batchelor on H.G. Wells. Barnard gets a great deal into his short book, presenting a rather different Keats from that of the many other Keats scholars and biographers. Keats’s vividness has been present to his admirers in many forms. In ...”

“... appeared in little magazines, the incessant reader (even on safari), the recipient, like Henry James, of an obscure wound that kept him from the war. Were his stories full of ‘action’ or of ‘love’? Did he sympathise with men or with women? Was he more interested in plot or in character? What did he mean by ‘style’: the way a matador moved in a ...”

“... doesn’t give a toss what you think.’ The current editor, Stuart Higgins, is a champion of Sir James Goldsmith’s campaign for a referendum on Europe, the only true expression of the people’s will. Along with other Tory papers, the Sun goaded Major into taking a tougher line on the British beef ban, and, when he did, the paper celebrated: MAJOR SHOWS ...”

“... Act, which was intended to discourage ‘white slavers’ driving women across a state line, see Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise). In many American hotels the rule was that a man should never entertain a woman in his room without leaving the door open, even if the woman was his aunt or his grandmother. If he failed to comply his telephone would ...”

“... relatively standard cases of the urge to ‘be a man’. Leave it to the genteel types – William James being another and later example – to mistake manhood for the capacity to endure pre-arranged physical hardship. Their version, no doubt, of the English public school. It will be obvious that Leverenz likes to stay close to home – as with ...”

“... brings aspects of his work into sharper focus without unduly cleaning up its oddness and irony. James Gordon Farrell – Jim to his friends – turns out to have had more in common with J.G. Ballard than with Paul Scott, George MacDonald Fraser, M.M. Kaye and other writers of 1970s bestsellers with imperial themes. Like ...”

“... to do. It would have been a lot sadder if they died before achieving what they were meant to. Like Scott. Scott was bad, I was out of it for days.’‘He probably wasn’t happy about it either.’‘Whereas Amundsen’s death was a bit more ambiguous. He did what he set out to. And then there was something decent about him ...”

“... Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up Cavendish’s World’s Olio was probably the philologist Thomas Jefferson Conant. A Louisville china ...”

“... are poems about Lenin, Aberdeen, Freud, Miss Brodie’s Edinburgh, King Lear, Hamlet, Gaelic, Scott, Keats, Australia, deer, a dead sheep – indeed, such variety of interest that you wonder what principle brings them together. In the poem about Lenin, Smith praises        the moving on into the endlessly various, real, human, world which is no ...”

“... snobs and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”