“... genesis and maturing of his story, with special reference to the technical problem of making the little girl the central consciousness of the narrative. ‘The most delightful difficulty,’ James says, ‘would be to make and to keep her so limited consciousness the very field of my picture . . . the one presented register of the whole complexity would be ...”

“... for Walpole, the profiteering manipulator of a stage-play world. If Fielding’s early biographer Arthur Murphy is to be believed, there was little exaggeration here. ‘When he had contracted to bring on a play,’ Murphy stiffly reports, ‘he would go home rather late from a tavern, and would, the next morning, deliver a ...”

“... home in the Lake District, he had finished the autobiography: an outspoken, sometimes boastful little volume, which ended with an unguarded attack on some of the Oxford philosophers ‘of my youth’ as ‘propagandists of a coming Fascism’. The University Press had to overcome a few qualms, and insisted on some revisions, before publishing it the ...”

“... a spirit lamp’; she ‘filled the silver teapot and received her daughter’s kiss, emanating a little draught of violets’. The Duchy and Rachel are elevated into a saintly ordinariness. They are a mostly vanished English middle-class type: girlish into old age, unsexual (the Duchy sleeps alone because the Brig snores, and Rachel’s yielding to Sid feels ...”

“... were at least serious about literature. Too much so, one might claim. The surreal figure of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who in the early years of the Cambridge English Faculty would greet a lecture audience composed largely of women with the word ‘Gentlemen!’, is partly excused for his belletristic waffling on the grounds that he was modestly ...”

“... based on increased in size – a virtual statistical impossibility. When erstwhile Burt admirer Arthur Jensen forth-rightly confirmed and elaborated Kamin’s revelation, most psychologists agreed with his concession that Burt’s results were ‘useless for hypothesis testing’. Furious debate ensued, however, after Oliver Gillie alleged in a 1976 Sunday ...”

“... The big puzzle about anthrax is that terrorists have so far used it so little. After all, the bulk of the world’s population lives in countries where it occurs naturally, and where it isn’t difficult to get live material to start a culture. The notion that you need to be trained in biological warfare to grow it is ludicrous ...”

“... Graffiti. In those days the studio system still had power over him: ‘It’s like taking your little kid and cutting off one of her fingers. “It’s only a finger, it’s not that big a deal,” they say. But to me, it’s just an arbitrary exercise of power. And it irritates me enormously.’ Lucas has constructed a professional self which is the ...”

“... the British flag across the Pacific: with Cook to his death in Hawaii in 1779, then with Captain Arthur Phillip to the new penal settlement in Botany Bay in 1788. A second copy, rather less worthy, travelled on the Bounty with William Bligh and was taken by the mutineers to Pitcairn Island. Hence Umberto Eco playfully suggests at the end of his own recent ...”

“... Had they been, the Party would indeed have been unique. Perhaps the best essay in the book is on Arthur Balfour and the controversy over tariff reform in the first decade of the 20th century, when Britain had lost what the economist Alfred Marshall called its ‘industrial leadership’, and when the Conservative Party came nearer Green’s vision of it ...”

“... are well known to readers of his previous books, most relevantly The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and little with the former, which hardly needs my twopenn’orth of praise and whose faults, as revealed over the years, are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate ...”

“... manuscript’, was discovered in the archives of Hereford Cathedral in 1907. The next year Arthur Thomas Bannister became a canon there. His appointment had been somewhat controversial: a man ‘of singular simplicity and directness’, he was known for his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly ...”

“... Mr Auden had been feeling while he wrote it like a middle-aged schoolmaster preparing a report on little Alfred’s work and behaviour.’ That counted as rough stuff in 1946. The magazine English devoted its front-page editorial to an excited account of this ‘spirited controversy’, and Auden himself evidently felt he had been knocked about a ...”

“... of physique or habits of deportment’ to reveal character. Mr Merdle, the corrupt financier in Little Dorrit, appears to condemn himself, long before anyone else has, by the manner in which he greets his daughter-in-law, Mrs Sparkler (the erstwhile Fanny Dorrit): ‘When he put his lips to hers, besides, he took himself into custody by the wrists, and ...”

“... later tell Elizabeth Gaskell that Southey’s letter had been ‘kind and admirable’, if ‘a little stringent’, to the writer himself she returned an answer in which genuine humility and self-abasement can barely be distinguished from an edgy and corrosive irony:   In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my ...”