“... chosen an artful form of narrative that cannot carry any great burden of exposition. I wish that Collins had appended ‘In Pursuit of Guzman’ to the novel. E.L. Doctorow’s last three novels have returned to the period of his boyhood, the Thirties. Each features boy heroes and mingles daydreams of adolescence with the adult disciplines of Modernist ...”

“... tradition as it continued, albeit in diluted form, in the panegyrics of liberty by Akenside, Collins, Thomson and others. He includes Gray’s Elegy because of its compassion for the poor, but one might expect a radical poet to be a bit less dismayed at the fact that Cromwell was born. Paulin is more at home in the Romantic period: a particular interest ...”

“... He duly proposed to her in Heal’s, and she turned him down. It was, he later admitted, his ‘Mr Collins moment’. Failing to realise how much of their relationship had been in his own head, he assumed, in defiance of Helen’s forthright character, that this was mere maiden modesty. In fact it was she who thought him less than serious, this ...”

“... of a cupboard, hidden beneath her rain cape. This tiny jolt of drama, a moment almost of Wilkie Collins plotting, doesn’t seem extravagant as a long-service award offered – in lieu of a gold watch – to the reader just reaching the 550-page mark, and perhaps considering retirement. It’s another century, and another hundred pages, before this plot ...”