“... each of her uneaten meals with his habitual exhaustiveness’; but while Pamela, as Margaret Anne Doody has shown, dwells with loving concreteness on the satisfactions of the appetite, Clarissa carefully avoids such specificity, purposefully obscuring cause and effect where the heroine’s lack of hunger is concerned. And for good reason to linger over ...”

“... remarkable novel. They invoke Gil Blas and the Thousand and One Nights, Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe (Potocki seems to have mentioned doing something ‘à la Radcliffe’), and Cazotte, Beckford, Sade, Charles Nodier and Jules Verne. The blurb to the present translation speaks of an affinity with ‘Stendhal or Fielding, with glances towards ...”

“... to provide comfortable fantasies. It must also be acknowledged that they can possess great power – proximity and prosaic fact can provide a voyeuristic frisson which nothing on stage or screen can match. But all such reconstructions inevitably promote a false confidence in what we can know about the past, as if seeing it were equivalent to ...”

“... it as a matter of theology and ecclesiology, without relating it closely to the realities of power that led to its articulation by the King in the 1530s. This is an impressive collection of essays, adding greatly to our knowledge and understanding of Fisher’s life and death. Only Bradshaw slips back into old-fashioned Catholic apologia. ‘The question ...”

“... written book. Perkins is at times forced into self-parody: ‘Except for her poetry and madness, Anne Sexton (1928-74), née Harvey, lived as a suburban housewife.’ But he does his best to enliven things with biographical vignettes. The revelation that John Ashbery was a radio Quiz Kid at the age of 14 does nothing to undermine my prejudices against his ...”

“... a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the Martian and Venusian deserts, while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,000 francs to the Académie des sciences to be awarded to the first person to communicate successfully with aliens, with the proviso that they couldn’t be Martians, whose existence was already ‘sufficiently well ...”

“... conscientious daily witnessing is always coloured by the hindsight the reader brings to it. Like Anne Frank, Kruk had no knowledge either of his own future or of Hitler’s intentions towards the Jews (information comes erratically as rumour, often wrong), but unlike Frank, Kruk was a political activist, overwhelmingly concerned as a member of the Socialist ...”

“... books? What kind of existence do they have? In Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (1998), Anne Lake Prescott calls his fictive titles ‘nonbooks’ or ‘promises of books’: ‘oscillating between being and nonbeing’, she writes, they are ‘the librarian’s equivalent of negative wonder’. Imaginary books come close to being real, but then ...”

“... and as affecting as anything in The Best Years of Our Lives, a test case for the younger Clift’s power to move us. Responding to an act of arbitrary unfairness, Prewitt has given up a place in a bugle company in order to become a simple infantryman. His best friend, Maggio, played by an impishly wiry Frank Sinatra, has just died as a consequence of the ...”

“... surgery, so that Jay Gatsby receives the looks first of Robert Redford then Leonardo DiCaprio. Anne Hathaway’s blandly pretty mask is tied with cinematic ribbon over Jane Austen’s blurry features – a criminal defacement however photogenic the impostor. Traffic the other way, taking cinema as the basis for fiction, tends to focus on headline-grabbing ...”

“... the Worshipful Company of Stationers, a prestigious body in decline, which had lost its monopoly power; nor was he ever a member of any of the ‘congers’, the more or less stable consortia of leading booksellers who would pool resources in major ventures. They were called congers, a contemporary alleged, because ‘as a large conger eel is said to devour ...”

“... way Karl Liebknecht ended up, ‘murdered in prison alongside Rosa Luxemburg after their bid for power failed in 1919’. But Mark seems so pathetic, his understanding of what he’s doing so slight that the comparison makes him ridiculous. Each time I read the novel, I put it down at this point: I couldn’t stomach any more whiny men, and I couldn’t see ...”

“... or indignant humour’. In 1978 Cecil Beaton attributes to the society philanthropist Lady Anne Tree ‘an oversize personality and character – rorty, Hogarthian and with exquisite understanding of character’, and in 2003 a writer in the Economist evokes a ‘Hogarthian throng of cheerful tradesmen and naughty ’prentice boys’. ‘March of the ...”

“... inertia prevailed. Now, with the politicians themselves running gagging down the corridors of power, the obstacles rapidly disappeared. The Thames Purification Bill was introduced on 15 July and swiftly passed into law on 2 August, the last day of the session. Thus 1858 was fated to be famous in British history principally for the Great Stink, as it was ...”

“... truth, whereas Chaucer, like Ovid, ‘suggests that when people believe in one truth, sovereign power and unchallengeable discourse … other people tend to get damaged, even killed’. Having seen the tyranny of the Visconti dynasty first-hand, he may have been appalled (as Boccaccio was) by Petrarch’s willing service to the lords of Milan. But he had ...”