“... His subject is an underworld within an underworld: certain followers of the proto-socialist Thomas Spence as they pursued their aims from the period of anti-Jacobin governmental action of the late 1790s, through Spa Fields, Peterloo and Cato Street, to the early years of Chartism. These men were not centre-stage in any of these events, nor were they in ...”

“... desire and money as part of a course about 20th-century narrative I’d titled, quoting from Thomas Wolfe, ‘Life is strange and the world is bad’; nothing else but Pandora’s Box would do. Happily, they did not fidget or shuffle, but sat like mice. Finally Jack the Ripper stabbed Lulu just as, or just because, she turns towards him the full force of ...”

“... More than three centuries ago. Sir Thomas Browne noted ‘the humour of many heads to extol the days of their forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times present’. He added that these nostalgic declaimers seem always to have been present, and indeed one can find notable examples of them from virtually all periods of human history ...”

“... art, from the 12-metre Athena to Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde to Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove: although in the case of Athena, as in that of the Statue of Liberty, the response may be suggested in reverse, through the comedy of its own implausibility. In advertising, the female form equates desire with the ...”

“... of something else.’ So it’s rather a blow to Barney to discover he’s a reincarnation of Thomas Hardy. The discovery comes about at a séance organised by Sharon in her bookshop, where, under the influence of a hypnotist, Barney finds himself recounting, in the first person, Hardy’s memory of watching the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester when ...”

“... the manuscript that bears her meaning gets blown up. Maybe Brookner’s view, which holds, like Thomas Mann’s, that to be a writer means dying to ordinary life, is less discouraging. Wolf’s Kleist feels something of this kind, but struggles at the boundaries between ideas and writing and life. Boundaries are important, too, in connecting these ...”

“... of the Corbett family, ‘who were murdered During the Massacre of the Christians in Delhi’; to Thomas Collins and no fewer than 23 members of his extended family, ‘all barbarously murdered at Delhi on or about the 11th of May 1857’; to Dr Chimmun Lall, a ‘native Christian and a Worshipper in this Church’, who ‘fell a martyr to his faith on the ...”

“... Patrick Bateman kills a girlfriend, apparently because she thought that his suit was designed by Henry Stuart rather than Giorgio Armani. This reduces murder to the merely satirical. A motive and an action are set up against each other in a way that says, without very much intelligence or subtlety: ‘These are the motives which this society says matter and ...”

“... on Elizabeth’s life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her ...”

“... grumbling about the lighting of paintings in Venice for some time. These include John Ruskin and Henry James, who, Mamoli Zorzi writes, ‘fell in love with the paintings in San Rocco despite not being able to see them properly’. Ruskin wrote that the three halls in San Rocco were ‘so badly lighted, in consequence of the admirable arrangements of the ...”

“... chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the ...”

“... One will look at the books in the rack with a new respect now that one knows their origins in Henry James and Nietzsche. The principle on which Mills & Boon runs its list is that the imprint is always greater than the author. Over the years, the firm has built up a stable of romancers several of whom (like Jean S. Macleod) have a hundred or more titles to ...”

“... and persistence of the satire that undercut the successive fashions in chivalric enthusiasm. Thomas Love Peacock’s Mr Chainmail in Crotchet Castle, ‘a good-looking young gentleman ... with very antiquated taste’, who ‘holds that the best state of society was that of the 12th century, when nothing was going forward but fighting, feasting and ...”

“... The Medici Venus was admired, as the Cnidian statue had been, in alarming ways. The bibliophile Henry George Quin, for instance, records in his diary (extracts of which were published in an amusing article by Arthur Rau in the Book Collector in 1964) how, in the winter of 1785, he ‘stole’ into the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there ...”

“... greatness and purpose, through the values elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin ...”