“... has hitched a ride on the Mr Darcy plotline, but without bothering to give her heroine any of Elizabeth Bennet’s spirit – raising a reprise of the Bridget question, why would a man of any style or substance fall for a lummox like her? To which Meyer offers two answers, one conventional and one less so: because she’s the avatar of the audience, which ...”

“... Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have nominated? Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett? Or conceivably ... himself? Waugh has even proved exportable to America: Brideshead Revisited was the most popular series ever shown on American public-service television. Still, his former admirer Edmund Wilson was revolted ...”

“... capable of becoming mantras of a sophisticated sort, gaining power from repeated contemplation. Elizabeth Hardwick’s ‘coolly composed sentences’, for instance, gave Dillon something to hang on to, ‘but there was enough about them of intentional disarray that I felt as though in her essayism she understood extremes.’ He makes a meal of one ...”