“... a man who manages to appear the supreme egotist, while seeking a kind of extinction of the ego. A passage in the unfinished novel Cécile – which recounts under the thinnest fictional veneer the story of Constant and Charlotte – is remarkably suggestive. The narrator and Cécile rendezvous at the Bal de l’Opéra where, both wearing masks, they stay till ...”

“... demand nothing further of the artist than a smile or a tear.’ According to Jane Mayo Roos, this passage shows ‘the degree to which the public came to the Salon to be amused, titillated, horrified and thrilled, much as they would seek some of the same pleasures at the café-concert.’ And why not? Why shouldn’t they expect successors to great early ...”

“... a handbag. His mother died in a home in Yorkshire in 1961, mentally deranged. Mrs Tynan quotes a passage of self-accusation, written years later, from his journals: ‘If she had come to London and lived with me in the Fifties, she could have been sustained by human contact ... I could have postponed her death at the expense of my own absorption in ...”

“... was another of the things affirmed, as Perry Anderson suggests when summarising an argument by Charles Jencks: In a society where information now mattered more than production, ‘there is no longer an artistic avant-garde’ since ‘there is no enemy to conquer’ in the global electronic network. In the emancipated conditions of today’s ...”

“... about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is sometimes assigned almost magical properties, or is credited with being a mysterious preservative for subject-matter which no longer interests. This is far from being absolutely true. Style alone cannot ...”

“... but also a historically-determined direction: that of the Soviet revolutionary struggle. The passage of time diminished the appropriateness of the original direction, and in 1932 Eisenstein, having out-stayed his leave of absence trying to make Que viva Mexico!, found disfavour in the eyes of Russia’s most powerful viewer, Stalin. This was a ...”

“... he was a born academic, absorbed in his armchair analysis of morals and social institutions, and Charles Lamb got his temperament right when he dubbed him ‘the Professor’. The book which made him, Political Justice (1793), was certainly not meant to emulate Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in whipping up the political passions of the man in the street. It was ...”

“... as a boy he met Dickens in Victoria Park, Hackney and talked about authorship to him. There is a passage on these lines in Paul Kelver. But Jerome was not the only public figure to boast of such an encounter (see Coulson Kernahan’s introduction to Moss’s life). Jerome’s works are as treacherous a guide to reality as the travels of Perelman. The ...”

“... is extremely tactile, its touchingness embodied in touch, its feelings felt in the fingers. The passage work in the recapitulation of the first movement of the A minor Piano Sonata (K.410), for example, describes an expressive contour which the hand that plays it brings into being, as though the hand were singing, as though the exquisite dissolutions of the ...”

“... hucksterism and fewer footnotes. You can take the temperature of the writing from the very opening passage, where it is stated that ‘We have placed men on the moon, yet ... ’ In my experience, this is the unvarying prelude to a mass of dissociated generalisations and complaints, of the country-dogsward variety. Gingrich affects to believe that the country ...”

“... another heroic character call him ‘the whitest Jew since the Apostle Paul’. A self-referential passage in the same book has someone explaining how to write a mystery novel. You take three images at random – ‘say, an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew ...”

“... work in European literature, both parts written in the shadow of the Inquisition. In another passage, Cervantes gives Sancho some lines whose reference to the expulsion of the Muslims and Jews is unmistakeable: ‘I’d like your grace to tell me why is it that Spaniards, when they’re about to go into battle, invoke St James the Moor-Slayer and ...”

“... or much maligned royal statesman?’ Brooke’s near hagiography has a foreword by Prince Charles, whom he befriended in the Royal Archives at Windsor: ‘We both agreed that George III had been unfairly maligned by historians and the writers of textbook history.’ More recently, shorter lives by Christopher Wright (2005) and Jeremy Black (2020; an ...”

“... examples, just as we are invited to describe our own idea of Eden. Again, in another very funny passage Auden evokes four kinds of critic he hopes a poet might not turn into: ‘a prig, a critic’s critic, a romantic novelist or a maniac’. The first is a person ‘for whom no actual poem is good enough’; the second manages ‘to deprive someone who has ...”

“... it was: not only solitary reproduction but self-regeneration. Among the highest forms of life – Charles I, say, or Louis XVI – to cut in two is to kill; but to divide the LCS in two is to stimulate a process of infinite growth, ‘unbounded extension’, apparent immortality. Alongside this representation of the Society as unbounded, however, there is ...”