“... a major work that would seem tailor-made for her thesis, such as Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, her command of Scottish and American fiction is sure and precise, and the parallels she draws between Calvinistic and provincial thinking are, with few exceptions, just. But are these resemblances aetiologically significant? Do they show puritanism to ...”

“... fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hour With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. The novel at a crucial point reaches the same mood as well as the identical locale; and Stetson’s corpses ‘planted last year in your garden’ are likewise mimicked in the ...”

“... some 20 in all – including two superb profiles. One of them was of a woman named Mazie P. Gordon, ‘a bossy, yellow-haired blonde’ who ran the Venice movie theatre, just off the Bowery. ‘She is profoundly uninterested in moving pictures and is seldom able to sit through one,’ Mitchell writes of her. ‘ “They make me sick,” she says.’ But ...”

“... old. According to the French envoy Albert Fontenay, he had been ‘nurtured in fear’. When Mary Queen of Scots was pregnant with James, her unfaithful and estranged husband, Henry, Lord Darnley, burst into her room at Holyroodhouse with a band of armed men. After hurling an accusation of adultery at Mary and David ...”

“... now, by extension, included. Subsequently, in a similar conversation with the Oxford sociologist Gordon Marshall, Gordon (who is as authentically Scottish as Alastair) describes watching the 1966 World Cup Final on a flickering black and white TV in a pub in a West Highland village. He was one of perhaps a dozen out of ...”

“... impossible to pin tears down.’ Dixon directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Keats might have thought this rather like a Department for Unweaving the Rainbow. Dixon is no dry-eyed Dryasdust. He confesses that he himself is liable to weep at operas and soap operas, at the triumphs and disasters of Wimbledon and ...”

“... the patronising smugness. At that point they really will have paid the price for Blair’s war. Mary Beard In the States, the coalition has already attracted far more media attention than is usually bestowed on matters British. This is partly because the very idea of a coalition government appears extraordinary here, given the scale and anger of partisan ...”

“... favour had overseen the peaceful transfer of the English throne from James II to William and Mary; practical questions about when, after moments of rebellion or usurpation, it was proper to give de facto allegiance to a newly ‘settled’ government; and historical arguments about the preservation of the ancient English constitution. The term ...”

“... opening this quasi-facsimile edition: the typeface is patently of two centuries later, and indeed Gordon Campbell comes clean in his appended essay. The Gothic or black-letter type of the original is thought to be too difficult to read easily, even for the sort of people who would enjoy such a volume. That has an unfortunate side effect common to any modern ...”

“... and colourful Omega rugs. Manners also relaxed. Young men used each others’ first names and in Gordon Square for the whole of Christmas 1905 Virginia ‘never once changed for dinner which is my height of bliss’. But of course she hadn’t cooked the dinner. Sophie Farrell and Maud Chart, the cook and housemaid from Hyde Park Gate, had come with the ...”

“... that was none too scrupulous. He persuaded the curators of Manning’s papers at the Church of St Mary of the Angels in Bayswater that he was the authorised biographer and carted away about half of them in a hansom cab. Since he was not even mentioned in Manning’s will, he had no claim at all to act in this way. The unfortunate Bodley was abroad at the time ...”

“... cities consumed it with fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and rereading it always produced a lump in my throat, and that ...”

“... hidey-holes in whatever she said.’In his acknowledgments to this book, Lutz proclaims: ‘To Gordon Lish I owe everything.’ Asked about Lish’s influence on his work in a 2006 interview, Lutz recalled ‘nosing about in bookstores in the mid-1980s’ and being ‘struck by certain slim books of prose fiction in which the sentences all but protruded ...”

“... statement of un-English vehemence. Un-modern-English, one corrects oneself, passing St Mary Woolnoth’s rusticated walls as one heads down Lombard Street to get another view of Lloyd’s. How did it happen? How was Lloyd’s persuaded to buy this kind of architecture? Its equivalent in gents’ suiting would scandalise the trading floor – a ...”

“... Rosalind, was the daughter of the classical scholar and all-round good egg Gilbert Murray and Lady Mary, daughter of the earl and countess of Carlisle, owners of Castle Howard and much else. Arnold J. Toynbee’s uncle, also called Arnold, had died young in 1883 after a promising beginning as a social reformer and radical economic historian (he is credited ...”