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“... the likelihood of floods). He didn’t get away with it. Sixty years ago, Kenneth Haworth removed George Gilbert Scott’s reredos and transparent iron screen from the chancel. He did get away with it. Pevsner wrote that it was ‘a crime against the tenets of the Victorian Society but the need of the 13th-century cathedral was indeed greater than ...”

“... better known and loved than Forster himself, though here having to answer to the first name ‘George’, perhaps by contamination from the actor George Arliss, once, but no longer, famous. In discussing the contents of the book it might be best to begin by disposing of Appendix A, which is devoted to 11 poems, mostly ...”

“... not by Rochester, because they are known to be by other people, by Elizabeth Rochester, Sir George Etherege, Sir Carr Scroope and John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave. Well-known poems turn up under the rubric ‘Writings for the theatre’ even when no evidence of a theatrical intent can be adduced; thus the fragment in Rochester’s holograph beginning ...”

“... hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance of a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813 confirmed his apostasy from radical politics. Other names aim at ...”

“... Only two of the 43 are black – Frederick Douglass and the restaurateur and political activist George T. Downing. This is a problem, as Reconstruction was a national crisis, not one restricted to the capital. Current scholarship emphasises that grassroots black activism, including public meetings and mass demonstrations throughout the South in favour of ...”

“... including Monckton Milnes, Richard Burton and D.G. Rossetti. Ruskin and Burne-Jones discovered it; Meredith was bowled over by it. By the century’s end it had already gone through hundreds of editions. In his ABC of Reading Ezra Pound proposed the critical exercise: try to find out why the Rubaiyat has been so successful. Not so difficult, perhaps, for the ...”

“... against the Victorian novel, it was understandable that the discursive authors, from Dickens to Meredith and Hardy, should stand in the pillory as warning examples of what was most to be avoided. When the young Eliot complimented James on the fact that no rough bundles of concepts disfigure and coarsen his novels, he at once went on to cite ...”

“... find the term in her reference book. In Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Peacock’s Crotchet Castle, Meredith’s Beauchamp’s Career, Huxley’s Crome Yellow, Mann’s Magic Mountain and Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, characters sit around and converse about – precisely – the issues which are exercising similar figures in the real world. Indeed, to debate ...”

“... a kind of tea-break in the intellectual working day. An objection suggests itself, which is that George Orwell wrote about the ‘English national character’, and Orwell was not a man to write to no purpose. But consider what he wrote – viz. that ‘a profound, almost unconscious patriotism and an inability to think logically are the abiding features of ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... a strong bond between them. EBB’s confession that she had been covertly reading Victor Hugo and George Sand apparently evoked a sympathetic response, and she impetuously replied by determining to supply the other with the forbidden texts – to make of Miss Mitford ‘an accomplice in act as in desire’. After anonymously ordering a shipment to be sent by ...”

“... Victorians mentioned so far, he has devoted books or substantial parts of books to James, Hardy, Meredith and Trollope. It isn’t that there haven’t been other subjects; Wallace Stevens, in particular, recurs in all Miller’s work, and he has also written about various writers of the post-Victorian century, including philosophers and critics. But ...”

“... far behind. Yet there was also a line of writers who seemed unable to tap this wealth – Gissing, Meredith, Conrad, Ford. Between The Secret Agent and Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks, both published in 1907, there is an enormous space, whether you estimate it by sales or by quality: but the space is not absolutely vacant. Where, along the line between Glyn and ...”

“... his writing. His reputation as a novelist is secure: critics mention him in the same breath with Meredith. Yet if Hardy had died in 1901 he would have no reputation as a poet at all: at best he would stand with George Eliot as a great novelist who had also written some poems, of which the less said the better. You might ...”

“... Moorcock’s distemper remains, despite the viral assaults of life in a genetically-modified George W. Bush fiefdom (fevers, sweats, steroid-regimens), genially satiric rather than venomous and bile-secreting; he targets the virtual reality spooks of Lit-Lite. The fawn jackets. The suit-bags. The shaved sentences. English fiction (the creative reading ...”