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“... faced down conservative prejudice to offer work to a Jewish refugee like him. His Yale colleague Charles Hendel was relieved to find that Cassirer was ‘not a prima donna’ (unlike ‘many European professors’), and indeed that he ‘liked his students’ and was working on his spoken English in the hope of better ...”

“... the turn of the century can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their biography, thirty years ago, but it is not true any ...”

“... February Revolution and the June Days (1848), the coup d’état of 1851 and the Paris Commune. Charles X appears only as the monarch who made Gros a baron and refused to allow David back from exile. The Siege of Paris in 1870 is merely an aggravation of Edmond Goncourt’s grief at losing his brother. This elimination of historical detail corresponds to ...”

“... in the primary source (in this case the archive at Newnham assembled by Jane’s companion Hope Mirrlees) determined all subsequent interpretations. Those who have used it have perpetuated a narrative of Harrison’s career as founded on ‘passionate friendship’, because the archive is itself the product of the passionate friendship of Mirrlees and ...”

“... of enormous proportions. Huge quantities of factual narrative have been injected into it, in the hope of beguiling reviewers into acknowledging its historical respectability. For all that, the underlying argument is simple – the title gives it away. Britain began to go to the dogs in the period between 1880 and 1914. That was because the ruling classes ...”

“... In Ancien Régime Paris, small, insecure venues offered the majority of women artists their best hope of forging a public presence. A number exhibited at the al fresco Exposition de la Jeunesse, which was held annually in the Place Dauphine, and considered disreputable because it involved women mixing outside in a public space (‘it is murderous to ...”

“... his biographer Roger Lonsdale saw Fanny Burney as the villainess in her father’s story. In Dr Charles Burney he accused her of conscious dishonesty and ruthless egoism in her Memoirs of her father, in which she was found guilty of having schemed – by omission, distortion and outright invention – to enhance her father’s moral reputation, her ...”

“... to be endured’: meaning, I suppose, that I congratulate Mr Baker on a brilliant performance and hope he will not want to repeat it. Howie is an oddly elusive creation; his mind is recorded in every tremor of its movement, and yet – perhaps because his relationships with others are barely adumbrated – we miss a personality, and are thus obliged to forgo ...”

“... was 35 and stricken with malaria in what is now Indonesia when, in 1858, he wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in England that would send Darwin into a tailspin. In a feverish ‘flash of light’, Wallace had independently stumbled on the theory of natural selection. Darwin had been working on the idea for some twenty years, but had not yet ...”

“... In​ 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were nearby and, if so, what sort of threat they presented ...”

“... My father was a wicked man – a very wicked man,’ Charles Dickens’s daughter Kate Perugini wrote. ‘My father did not understand women.’ Yet he was never simply a chauvinist. Though he would not acknowledge women’s independence, he recognised their ambitions outside the home. He admired his musical sister Fanny, and was drawn to Nelly Ternan, who became his mistress, partly because of her talents on the stage ...”

“... read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about corpses being committed to their snows by English clergymen – Switzerland was not yet an English colony, though beginning to look like one – and the bodies were reinterred at ...”

“... knickers. In the critical afterword to The Quincunx, his 1989 attempt at a neo-Victorian novel, Charles Palliser says that the main ingredient of the recipe is ‘inversion’. Take Jane Eyre, turn it upside down, shake well and you get Wide Sargasso Sea. The simplest, and bestselling, example of such inversion is George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman ...”

“... at the end, and its underlying emotional force is generated by the traditional Judeo-Christian hope for supernatural revenge upon one’s enemies. The stings of the world are felt in turn. ‘Train-bands’ are the militia, and ‘mates’ are fellows or boon companions: a macho company has shown up at his house (‘where I lay’) to bait the lone ...”

“... directed this time towards drumming up support for the treaty in the House of Commons in the hope of being made a colonial governor after the war. When the war was over, the Earl of Bute, who had been the young King’s tutor and was now his First Lord of the Treasury and his ‘dearest friend’, insisted on resigning. This meant that William did not ...”