“... Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion novel sequence, we are introduced to the hopeless young charmer Fielding Gray. His father is remote and sourly reactionary; his mother develops ominous signs of chippiness and puritanism. Young Fielding gets through most of the right hoops but usually in the wrong way. His public school, in ...”

“... Speeches in her Mouth, which are capable of very bad Applications’); while, in the Champion, Henry Fielding ridiculed the ever expanding category of the unsayable with absurd elliptical contractions: ‘RT HNBL’ (‘right honourable’), ‘STTT’ (‘statute’) and ‘CVNT GRDN’ (no translation required).Jokes like these riffed on the rules ...”

“... unresolved even at that point in the 1740s when, in the controversy between Richardson and Fielding, the new genre achieved the status of what Marx calls ‘a simple abstraction’, an identifiable category in its own right. McKeon’s terms are useful ones; and his theory argues attractively for the early novel’s significance as a crucial site of ...”

“... Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens (after the famous wit and the philanthropist, both friends), Henry Fielding Dickens (‘in a kind of homage’, Forster was told, ‘to the style of the novel he was about to write’). An exception is the ninth child, Dora Annie Dickens, named after the brainless girl David Copperfield loves and whom Dickens, at the ...”

“... invited readers to share their supernatural experiences. Almost a thousand of them wrote in. Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the South London suburb of Thornton Heath, rang the paper (a ghost didn’t seem a case for the police, she said). As she and her husband, Les, lay in bed, she told the journalist, there were strange happenings. A tumbler ...”

“... is a significant one in this context. In January 1960 Williams was playing with Fenella Fielding in the revue Pieces of Eight (largely written by Peter Cook) at the Apollo Theatre, and his diary entry for the 27th reads: ‘The show in evening went well, till Madam decided to ad lib one line before the tag in “Spies”. Of course it threw me ...”

“... to the barrier around the demesne. The Paisley of this period is partly modelled on the Rev. Henry Cooke, a reactionary and highly influential 19th-century preacher who did much to counter Presbyterian radicalism. This Paisley is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his ...”

“... novel yet’ implies a future of prosperous activity which may be barmecidal. The novelist-hero of Henry James’s story ‘The Middle Years’ is amused by the view that his latest novel is ‘the best thing he has done yet’: it ‘made such a grand avenue of the future’. This story is alluded to in detail in The Ghost Writer and is structurally as well ...”

“... aspiring novelists in the autobiography. He was the Arnold Bennett of his day, not a second Henry James; he was interested in the nuts and bolts of fiction-writing and how one might make a living by that occupation. Never in the faintest degree a theorist, he was concerned only with a story’s effect on the people who paid to read it. His sense of ...”

“... sister, JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell. But the consequences of a name are not always negative. Henry Fielding Dickens did not live up to the literary aspirations intended by his father, but Michelangelo Caravaggio seems to have viewed the accident of his Christian name (bestowed simply because he was born on 29 September, the day of St Michael) as a ...”

“... and Jules Verne. The blurb to the present translation speaks of an affinity with ‘Stendhal or Fielding, with glances towards Verne or Borges’. My own strong feeling, though, is that the inspiration was most probably Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. In his great novel, Diderot celebrated the revolt of the narrator against the reader. His narrator, from ...”

“... Aristotle wrote in the Poetics, ‘to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun.’ Fielding in Tom Jones argued that writers weren’t ‘obliged to keep even pace with time’, but would do well to steer clear of ‘monkish dullness’ and focus on ‘matters of consequence’ so as not to ‘resemble a newspaper, which consists of just the ...”

“... by female ones. The English novel, forged in the 18th century by men (Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, Sterne), was, as he saw it, being taken over by women. There were now probably more women than men writing novels, and there was no doubt that more women than men were reading them. For most of the 1860s, Mrs ...”

“... thoughtful study. In 1957 Watt published The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Few works of criticism from the second half of the 20th century have been more influential. The Rise of the Novel, MacKay reports, ‘continues to be amplified, supplemented or attacked – it must somehow be reckoned with – by every critic concerned ...”

“... everyone who is granted unrestricted access to secrets beyond top secret. He remembers telling Henry Kissinger in a briefing after Kissinger had become Nixon’s National Security Adviser: After you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more ...”