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“... grounds that anything which throws light on Dickens’s art is justified, however faint that light may be. But it looks very like keyhole-peeping. One of Tomalin’s achievements is that she investigates the private recesses of Dickens’s life without prurience and without making the reader feel prurient. One comes away with a sense that justice has at last ...”

“... really his own, not his publisher’s. When Scribners agreed to undertake the work, the editors may indeed have had very little notion of what James had in mind. What they expected, one presumes, was the removal of little errors, the replacement of an awkward phrase or two, the excision of a few redundant words. The author’s only writing task would be the ...”

“... fin de siècle is on its way out. If there are readers then, and if they are reading Gibbon, they may not be Euro-Americans and may be integrating the Decline and Fall into histories of their own – if, again, they are so fortunate as to possess histories. It was in 1896 also that Syaji Rao Gaekwar, Maharaja of Baroda, an ...”

“... than posit language-transcendent entities. It is a truism that, wherever in culture and history we may find ourselves, we form our beliefs solely in view of our ‘epistemic context’: the ‘reasons and evidence’ there available to us. Stout’s position is that what we are warranted in asserting here and now is relative to that context, although he has ...”

“... diaries), to which Park Honan draws attention, are of particular interest; and others like them may yet be found. The discovery of the play Sir Charles Grandison, or The Happy Man, the work of Jane Austen and her niece Anna, suggests that there may even yet be additions to the small body of literary manuscripts. There, at ...”

“... admirable characteristics. No one esteems anyone else simply for being possessive, even if they may envy the power which some accumulate under the goading of their will to possess, or may enjoy and admire the skills which others develop at least partly under the same impulses. To own, to have at one’s disposal, to ...”

“... ongoing affair with the English heritage. Mr Johnson’s volume on British Cathedrals may be in a well-established tradition, but it has unusual features. His criterion of selection is simply that a building must have been, or become, the seat of a bishop. Thus St Albans and Peterborough, Norman abbeys ‘episcopalised’ respectively in 1877 and ...”

“... haunt of the gods. The power of its finished form is now perhaps beyond imagination: but it may be doubted whether even the vast chryselephantine statue of Athene which it housed – and which was, by all accounts, incomparable in its vulgarity – added any awfulness to the place. The museum visitor who contemplates a marble Aphrodite ...”

“... knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains – that is his secret, his joke, as one may say.’ It’s not a secret now, and perhaps not much of a joke. But James would have been pleased to enter this literary monument, and to accept the re-bestowed national identity. In spite of appearances (he left America in 1875, when he was 32; he was ...”

“... love shows its face in country hotels, pleasant places, set down beside a stretch of water. Klima may perhaps be a common name in Czechoslovakia, and Kundera has become a common name in the conversation of Western readers, who are drawn to these reciprocal concerns of his. The free world may like him both for having ...”

“... our estimation of past glories, the recent declension does not appear so humiliating; a wry balm may thus be found by deprecating our past. Moreover, if the 19th-century economic achievement is downgraded, so, too, must be the liberal economic philosophy to which so much credit for economic success used to be given. Such an argument suggests that in the ...”

“... a home so costly as to exceed easily imagined explanations? The astronomical price of the Van Gogh may have been an eccentricity, rather than a milestone in the inevitable ascent to the $100 million canvas, and the same may be said of the $17.5 for which the Johns was knocked down. Indeed, the giddiness which characterised ...”

“... before it was replaced in the 1920s by ‘hitchhiking’. The origins of the word are disputed. It may have built on ‘auto-hiker’, hobo slang for this new type of traveller they were forced to share the highway verges with – ‘hitch’ suggesting the hitching post of horse travel, or possibly hitching, as in joining oneself, to a vehicle. The origin of ...”

“... Sometimes they are associated with key events in the history of the religion concerned. They may, like Bethlehem and Mecca, have been the founder’s birthplace, or, like Jerusalem and Lourdes, the scene of apparitions, martyrdoms or miracles. Mount Ararat in Turkey is sacred to the Armenians because it is where Noah’s Ark came to rest. Mount Kailas in ...”

“... of Ireland and America, for instance), and ignoring the old world of genteel trade courtesies. It may have emerged in tandem with the legally defensible intellectual property rights that came into being at the beginning of the 18th century, in response to a rapidly expanding readership and a culture of inventors eager to exploit commercial ...”