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“... Ah, Jane Austen! He is such a great novelist!’ That was said to me by a Hungarian émigré, who, when I mildly queried the ‘he’, explained: ‘I find those English pronouns tiresome. We don’t have them in Hungarian.’ Thus I stumbled on the fact, which I report now in Mario Pei’s words (and on his authority, since mine doesn’t rise to vouching for a syllable of Hungarian), that ‘in Hungarian the same word means “he”, “she”, “it” ...”

“... the ways in which consciousness multiplies itself. Normal and indeed fascinating. Both Karl Miller and Jeremy Hawthorn consider as one of their classic texts Conrad’s short story ‘The Secret Sharer’. Suggested by the concealment of a fugitive which actually took place on board the clipper ship Cutty Sark, the tale is of a young mate accused of ...”

“... Why ‘earthlings’​ ? David Miller isn’t drawing a contrast with justice for creatures from outer space. Nor is he taking issue directly with Ronald Dworkin’s ‘justice for hedgehogs’ in Dworkin’s book of 2011 with that title, although Miller does say in a footnote that he disagrees with him ...”

“... the watcher in the stalls to be read in due course as a man mounted on a camel. The sisters in Jane Austen’s novel perceive a single rider, whom they eventually distinguish ‘to be a gentleman’: but this, too, could be called a mirage. The occasion is almost over by the time we are able to gather that there have been two riders, one of them a ...”

“... a study of class and of sisterly relations not in all respects incongruous with the age of Jane Austen, as a pillow book. It’s true that it was once ragingly popular. But I can imagine it as a footnote in Eric’s Age of Revolution. When he was 94, he gave me another present, in the shape of a sympathetic letter on the publication of a book I’d ...”

“... island, and has formed a commune for drop-out youths. He takes up with a wandering Englishwoman, Jane, who has come looking for action in the Third World and has found this corner of it to be benighted and becalmed. The commune runs rapidly to seed, and trouble breaks out on the island. Whoever it is that is causing the trouble – and we are never told ...”

“... personage have presumably made substantial sums with their pedestrian efforts to complete two of Jane Austen’s unfinished novels, Sanditon and The Watsons. Georgette Heyer, imitating no one in particular, for years kept a faithful following with a series of indistinguishable novels in which very similar characters postured against the romantic backdrop of ...”

“... are now well into the Great Vegetable Revolution. ‘For the majority of the population,’ writes Jane Grigson, ‘vegetables as a delight, to be eaten on their own, belong to this century, even to the period after the Second World War.’ She gives much of the credit for this shift in taste to Elizabeth David, who in the 1950s preached that the fruits of the ...”

“... in his early years, which reached him and went down well. The first came when he and his wife Jane went to stay with George Barker, in Italy I think, and Barker exclaimed afterwards: ‘That boy! He’s got a tiger in his loins!’ Karl loved that. Who wouldn’t? His friends all got to hear about it. He laughed about it in a deprecating way but inside I ...”

“... Williams), ballets and music reviews. His interest in fiction developed only after his marriage to Jane Bowles (née Auer), and specifically out of the experience of assisting her to shape her gloriously original novel Two Serious Ladies, published in 1943. The letters printed here don’t, alas, shed all that much light on the couple’s first years ...”

“... Criticism Revisited: Where Are We Going? Where Have We Been?’ (Barbara Christian, Florence Howe, Jane Gallop, Nancy Miller, and me) attracted 1800 people, who jammed the aisles to hear that although the women’s movement is in disarray, feminist criticism, while no longer a coherent critical movement, has been fully ...”

“... three women going to a pub: a wife, a maid and a widow. They drink, gossip (‘What is become of Jane?’ ‘Oh, she is gone to dwell by London-wall’) and reminisce (‘But, Lord, the prankes that we mad-wenches playde’), especially about drinking (‘No Musique in the evenings we did lacke,/Such dauncing, Coussen, you would hardly thinke it/Whole ...”

“... for examples of what he calls ‘a genuinely critical impulse’, Joseph North picks out D.A. Miller’s subtle analysis of Jane Austen’s prose. ‘The critical voice speaking here is quite remarkable for the finesse with which it mimics the rhetorical effect it is describing,’ North writes, referring to a passage ...”

“... tries the strength of the sensible grand lady who inherits it. ‘ “Fudge!” muttered Lady Jane,’ who is ‘interested in old houses’ and in travel, like Wharton herself, and who finds out that a Regency ancestor has ill-treated his deaf-and-dumb wife, and sequestered her at Bells, with the help of an agent. The agent has triumphed over death, and ...”

“... to those exposers of knavery, La Rochefoucauld and Stendhal, and those exposers of foolishness, Jane Austen and Montaigne; all have major speaking parts in Elster’s play. In fact, his usual audience of economists, political scientists and psychologists are liable to take exception to his overt pleas for belletrism. In disciplines that frown on any ...”