“... Unlike many other mid-Victorian visitors from the Continent – Italians like Antonio Panizzi, James Lacaita, even Mazzini; or Frenchmen such as Louis Blanc and Hippolyte Taine – German exiles tended to stay away from their hosts. Engels was no exception. Both in Manchester, and then in Primrose Hill, where he moved in 1869, he was the epicentre of ...”

“... a group of ill-assorted travelling companions easing reluctantly into conversation in Headlong Hall, he was sure of raising a smile by making the topic on which they eventually settle ‘those various knotty points of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an English conversation’. By this point in her narrative, however, Harris has her work cut ...”

“... fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor naturally ...”

“... hero. Similarly, when a young white woman approaches Malcolm on the steps of Hamilton Hall at Columbia, her language is so soggy and self-serving (‘I’m a good person despite my whiteness’) that it’s a pleasure, for whites and for blacks, to hear her put in her place. She asks what she can do for the movement, and Malcolm brusquely ...”

“... in life, or is it all a question of chance? He sends off volleys of letters to his holy Uncle James in England, a man ‘sucked dry by the constant effort of belief’, who looks out of his East End mission window at the waste paper and the cabbage leaves and can think of nothing particularly comforting to say. Those who have least comfort are the people ...”

“... Victorian novelist. As for the sartorial descriptions in Surtees, they resemble nothing so much as James Joyce when the latter is indulging his appetite for specificity about garments and their constituents to the hilt – as in the Circe episode of Ulysses. There are so many of these passages in Surtees that it is hard to select one for quotation, and the ...”

“... with cliché and jargon: the clash of pulpit prose with racecourse slang, Shakespeare with Music Hall. Wodehouse knew that ‘exquisite Tanagra figurine’ was a cliché, but I bet that he, and Joss and Sally, thought that a Tanagra figurine was exquisite. I know better now. The passage in Quick Service made me realise that I had never to my knowledge seen a ...”

“... though it was to French invasion from Ireland – spent nine times more on repairing its town hall than it did on building up its coastal defences. This may have been criminal complacency, but Liverpool’s élite was manifestly not quaking in its shoes at the bogeyman of French-inspired insurrection. Wishful thinking is the occupational disease of all ...”

“... a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of Holland to ...”

“... Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, written with Catherine Hall and published in 1987. It would be good to know more about family traditions among labourers in the 19th century, but their lives have left fewer traces and Davidoff admits that her decision to leave out the working classes was largely dictated by ‘the ...”

“... from the lecture about love, it represents a twee repackaging of the very obvious. As James Wood has pointed out, Barnes likes to insist on life’s complexity and opaqueness in the most simplistic, cut-and-dried terms. The charge usually levelled against Barnes is that he’s an essayist rather than a novelist; that he writes from the brain not ...”

“... on spreading the good word that ‘metropolitan improvements’ – the upbeat title of a book by James Elmes which Shepherd illustrated – were steadily bringing into existence a city whose size, wealth and new look were rapidly making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London ...”

“... architectural history. In the years of Thomson’s apprenticeships in the 1840s, another Scot, James Fergusson, was busily chronicling the history of world architecture. By the end of the decade, it was possible for architects in the most remote provinces to form a clear picture of Hindu cave temples or ancient Egyptian palaces, and to contrast them with ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... of the working classes in the second half of the 20th century: ‘the telly, the car, the bingo hall … eating fish and chips in Spain’. The laughter of the Cheltenham audience is tinged with shock that he should be quite so sneering. In the second lecture, discussing the unfortunate consequences of Eliot’s ‘Francophilia’ and referring to his essay ...”