“... out on their bowling night’. A long way, Bech thinks, from Maxwell Perkins. Bech is like Scott Fitzgerald’s Pat Hobby, a minor sideline in fiction, to be relaxed with rather than worked at. But Updike nevertheless makes some sharp observations on current enemies of promise. And the whole set is enlivened by unrelenting bitchery. The rave notices of ...”

“... the 1640s. For royalists like Reresby, those who took up arms against the king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament was supposed to end with one big battle at Edgehill on 23 ...”

“... in 1771. Among his contemporaries, only Frances Burney was at the height of her powers. Neither Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances would soon enjoy immense popularity, nor the younger radical novelists such as Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Holcroft – with whom Bage is most commonly linked – had yet begun to publish. In these circumstances, Bage’s ...”

“... work of an English poetess’. Does she deserve a permanent place alongside Wordsworth and Byron? Scott regretted that he found in her ‘too many flowers and too little fruit’, and her modern critics divide into those picking the flowers and those enjoying the fruit. For the former, Hemans is no more than a writer of light verse for a middlebrow ...”

“... 1798 and 1799, 1802, 1804-5), true fellow-feeling is very rare. The Prelude has its moments – Ann Tyson asleep on her bible in IV, the hunger-bitten girl of IX, the London artificer – but neither VIII (‘Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind’) nor VII (designed presumably to represent Experience, a seeing how the others live) turns out to be ...”

“... on his wife, who was aware of at least some of the affairs. Eig devotes more attention to Coretta Scott King than previous biographers, emphasising that she was an anti-racist radical in her own right. It tells us something about life in the Jim Crow South that although she was the daughter of a successful Black businessman she grew up in a home in rural ...”

“... revolted by that book, and American intellectuals have never put him beside Faulkner, Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. And on the Continent there is no translation of Waugh as audacious as Avanti Jeeves.And yet even those who praise him nearly always begin by dissociating themselves from what they regard as his bigotry, his snobbery, his cruelty, his infatuation ...”

“... with the records, plus Shakespeare and the Bible; the first luxury, chosen by the actress Sally Ann Howes, was garlic, distressingly rare in postwar Britain.Plomley continued to script the show for live broadcast until the mid-1950s, proud of his ability – after taking them for lunch at his club (the Garrick for men, the Lansdowne for women) – to write ...”

“... the most literate people in their village: Parker Clare could certainly read, although his wife, Ann Stimson, did not know a single letter of the alphabet and, like many country people, regarded printed texts as a form of witchcraft. At this time, Bate notes, illiteratemeant not ‘unable to read’ but ‘ignorant of polite letters’. Clare and a twin ...”

“... of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... thing that ever happened to her. In his lavish and loving new book about Garland’s MGM years, Scott Brogan (who runs several websites devoted to her life and career) wonders whether she might have had an easier time of things, at MGM and beyond, had Frank lived longer.One of Frank Gumm’s singing partners said he had the most beautiful voice she had ever ...”

“... Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race. Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Stoddard’s fame was a sign of his times, of the overheated racial climate of the early ...”

“... or Beyoncé popular; but neither is she some divisive figure out on the blasted perimeter, like Scott Walker. Devoted fans prize her as one of our culture’s great ungovernable Outsiders. This fan club includes the grandees of the French establishment, who in 2005 named her a commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, making Smith about as much of an ...”

“... Thackeray, Dickens, Tennyson, the Brownings, George Lewes (though Jane refused to have Mary Ann Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically everybody, or at least practically everybody who either liked to talk or could ...”

“... mid-19th centuries: Milton, Hobbes, Dryden, Locke, Addison, Pope, Hume, Johnson, Gibbon, Smith, Scott, Austen, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Malthus, Carlyle, Dickens, Macaulay, Mill, George Eliot and more. The passing of the heroic age of biographical dictionary-making is nowhere more clearly signalled than in the fact that in the ODNB the entries for these 20 ...”