“... Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Jack the Ripper, Neill Cream, Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon, Joseph Smith, Armstrong, and Bywaters and Thompson. Orwell discounts Jack the Ripper as an altogether special artisan of murder, but of the remaining eight, six were poisoners. The perfect murderer, he explains, was one who would satisfy the requirements of the reader ...”

“... ink!), run "by the sort of men who called each other Wolly, Bunter, Biffy and Blinker. Mansfield Smith Cumming, the original ‘C.’, thought espionage ‘a capital sport’, and is memorably described by Phillip Knightley in his recently reissued study of 20th-century spying, The Second Oldest Profession:* He wore a gold-rimmed monocle, wrote only in ...”

“... and near-genteel friends and neighbours. As matchmaker in chief, the part of a Mrs Bennet or an Emma, Sophia Ainger the vicar’s wife does her best to manoeuvre Rupert Stone-bird into the arms of sister Penelope. Her expedients include a dinner party at the vicarage, the Christmas bazaar, an excursion to Rome after Easter for the parish ...”

“... among them Eugenides’s contemporary Jonathan Franzen and a younger cohort that includes Zadie Smith and Dave Eggers – have come to believe that too much was lost – in moral and emotional engagement, in readership – when realism was thrown over. As Franzen wrote in the New Yorker, ‘in college, I’d admired Derrida and the Marxist and feminist ...”

“... asserted] against the darkness.’ If all that stands between us and the darkness is Huck Finn and Emma Woodhouse, our condition must be dire indeed. Brooks is the latest in a line of critics from Coleridge to I.A. Richards for whom art, given what they see as a sterile political landscape, is an ersatz form of insight and fulfilment. Reading Henry James ...”

“... and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as Godwin’s publisher George Robinson and a number of dissenting ministers who, largely forgotten now, were important public intellectuals in the 1790s. The last third is largely taken up by letters to Wollstonecraft, and the volume at that point ...”

“... is usually true, nor do the proponents of such ideas fall into predictable political camps. Joan Smith, quoted by Watt, blows John Berger’s famous dictum that ‘men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ smartly out of the water as just another male fantasy. If they are interested in clothes, women look at other women, because their ...”

“... have been that Dahl (who anyway loved a put-down) shared a friend with Green, the painter Matthew Smith, whose work he did know and like. For surely Dahl could have had little time for an avant-garde writer like Green? Besides, Green was just the kind of Eton-and-Oxford Englishman who had made him feel so alien and unappreciated in the London literary world ...”

“... deficiencies. A second problem looks simple enough but can never be resolved. Why write a Life of Smith or Mrs Jones, and why should it be read? The Rousseauistic answer is that any life (especially mine, but even yours perhaps) is of interest if it can evoke a tear; and the reading public has been told, chiefly in autobiographies, how many a tender branch ...”

“... critical doctrine according to which the only subject of art is art and even such works as Emma are concerned chiefly with their own writing ... his tale comes close to exemplifying it.’ ‘Captain Flint’, a bald, fat man like Ransome himself, sits in his houseboat typing a book and shaking his fist at children who disturb him – but in the end ...”

“... Newsweek and People.* It was optioned for the movies, recorded as an audiobook by Anna Deveare Smith, and added to the reading lists of many courses in African-American literature. In May 2003, Gates donated the manuscript, now valued at $350,000 – he bought it for $8500 – to Yale University, from which he graduated in 1973. There was just one ...”

“... and where the new frontiers will coalesce. Medawar’s ‘genius’, his colleague John Maynard Smith told me, ‘was a bit unexpected. He had a genius for thinking of the right experiment which I enormously envy. I don’t have it myself: I never think of the right experiment. If I do an experiment at all, it’s usually the wrong one. Nor did Haldane, of ...”

“... director of the White Star Line, who according to the script insisted that the ineffective Captain Smith, emblem of Britain’s exaggerated sense of its seafaring skill, drive his ship at full speed through an icefield so it could set a transatlantic record that would push up his company’s share price, allowing him and his friends on the boat to profit by ...”

“... in his social context. This was a busy period in Darwin’s life. He moved to London, married Emma Wedgwood, and published his Journal of the Beagle voyage and his first geological papers. His gentlemanly independence, patronage by ‘the great Cambridge Dons’ and scientific dedication enabled him to slide straight into the upper echelons of the ...”

“... physiognomy of social types, applied by such writers as Flaubert in Madame Bovary, Jane Austen in Emma and Dickens in Great Expectations, also looms large in the history of 19th-century French caricature; and Wechsler’s main title recalls Fernand Baldensperger’s assertion that (in Tytler’s translation) ‘of all the 1830 generation, Balzac is the one ...”