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“... of suffocation’: this should have been good for a temporary remission of nymphomania. However, Fanny Burney, staying at Brighton, found it pleasant and stimulating to bathe at dawn (20 November 1782). And Corbin suggests that the whole business became rather sexy: ‘the mere contact of a bare foot on the sand was already a sensual invitation and a ...”

“... solid diarists like Henry Crabb Robinson or Farington will have made an entry: if all else fails, Fanny Burney will have been told what went on at a first night by someone less squeamish in the choice of entertainment. And for a little filling-in of background information, there is always the wandering patentee, Tate Wilkinson, whose memoirs reveal him ...”

“... child after child. In fact, George came to love Charlotte dearly, and her lady in waiting, Fanny Burney, testified to how lovable she was. Unusually, the king and queen slept in the same bed until they were separated by his madness. Even then, he told Burney, ‘The queen is my physician, and no man can have a ...”

“... impeachment in 1788 had been an enormous success, a piece of public theatre to which the likes of Fanny Burney felt themselves irresistibly drawn; by its close in the Lords in 1794, the number of spectators had dwindled greatly, and Burke had had to use his influence with the Speaker of the Commons to ensure the presence of even a small number of ...”

“... Boswell, as Kernan thinks, but by one of his informants. But it was a widely held view, shared by Fanny Burney. Boswell’s belief in his own scrupulous and carefully researched truthfulness contained an element of wishful thinking, as well as obscuring the fact, which scholars have since uncovered, that the Life was as much a work of shaping and ...”

“... hell of it: ‘Mrs B … often contradicted for the sake of argument,’ Amelia Opie reported; and Fanny Burney would have agreed, finding her ‘argumentative, precieuse … affected’. Even Anna Letitia le Breton, her fond great niece, remembered her as ‘rather stern’, and that seems to have been her habit, a social gruffness or belligerence being ...”

“... William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ‘savage’s good breeding’. Banks delighted in showing him off: an aristocratic friend ...”

“... execrable injustices ... have made almost any state preferable to such anarchy and desolation’. Fanny Burney called it ‘the noblest, deepest, most animated, and exalted work that I think I ever read’. Gibbon said, ‘I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can even forgive his superstition.’ These were ...”

“... Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and the code of daughterliness as represented in the novels. But the much more interesting sections afford us a ...”

“... well enough for the five most changeable speakers in his table, Marianne Dashwood, Mr Knightley, Fanny, Emma and Henry Crawford, not so well for the next best learners, Mrs Norris and Mrs Bennet. Once again, other authors fail to match Austen’s remarkable diversity. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel ‘develops’ considerably more than other figures in her ...”

“... not homogeneous, and in the hands of an amateur the ‘stopped’ notes might sound execrable. (Dr Burney, the father of Fanny and a formidable music critic, compared them to the shriek of ‘a person ridden by the night mare, who tries to cry out but cannot’.) In the hands of a virtuoso, however the ‘stopped’ notes ...”

“... things to say about pornography. The style, as she observes, is often quite decorous, as it is in Fanny Hill, and the essentially private, guilty act of reading pornography is excused, or perhaps made more exciting, by Cleland’s fluent, upmarket language and abstinence from vulgar expressions. ‘Private’ occupies 12 columns of the OED, not counting its ...”

“... in the real poor, though in Mansfield Park she works hard to convey an idea of the discomfort of Fanny Price’s family in Portsmouth. It is worth remembering that these were the years when, further to the north, Wordsworth was fascinated by starving children, beggars, aged shepherds and broken veterans of the French war. Copeland, whose essay in Jane Austen ...”

“... in the 18th century, we have epistles written in their teens, and from the early twenties (Frances Burney and Horace Walpole). Johnson was born in September 1709; the first letter of Volume I is dated 30 October 1731, when Johnson was 22. There must have been some letters by the younger Johnson – to his relation and benefactor Cornelius Ford, for instance ...”