“... A certain kind of book on the period makes it seem as though he was everywhere all at once. Matthew Sturgis’s Relative Failures, which offers a biographical portrait of Willie Wilde, as well as of two other siblings of famous men, Mabel Beardsley (sister of Aubrey) and Howard Sturgis (included on the dubious ground that his brother Julian, also a ...”

“... copyright law; there were the pioneering academics of Enlightenment Scotland, among them Adam Smith, who made ‘rhetoric and belles lettres’ a university discipline and exported it to North America. As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson (1656-1736). With his hard-nosed nephew Jacob the younger (1682-1735), Tonson dominated the ...”

“... he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham contemporaries Walter Allen and Reggie Smith – by a young lecturer in the Classics Department, Louis MacNeice. Reed had a remarkable speaking voice and a gift for mimicry (and for assuming the accents of a class not his own), and as an undergraduate he acted in and produced plays, which may have led ...”

“... England and America, and productive of a great deal of latterday ‘chatter about Harriet’, as Matthew Arnold had called it in deploring Shelley and his circle. What a set they had been, he said, and what a set was involved in the New Apocalypse, the wartime couplings of Fitzrovia and Poetry London. ‘Talent’ and the behaviour that went with it was ...”

“... much. Iris Murdoch’s argument ‘collapses the moment you give it the slightest prod’. Chris Smith, defending Blair’s invitation to Noel Gallagher, claimed that the prime minister was also deeply moved by King Lear, which is a ‘banal and evasive piece of claptrap’. With so much at stake, claptrap is the last thing we need; clear thinking on the ...”

“... with that world of financial services and consultancies which floated on the oil. At best we were Matthew Arnolds’s ‘remnant’. Class counted. In retrospect, this episode recalled the subterranean Institute in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, where the delegates to an interminable conference spectate on the external world via an immense camera obscura. Gray ...”

“... from the Philological Society and the biographical dictionary from the commercial publisher George Smith. With these two projects OUP inherited a curatorial responsibility which has, over the years, become increasingly burdensome. Unlike the National Heritage Commission, OUP has the task not just of conserving important national properties – that is to ...”

“... Seward and the Lunar Society, whose members also included Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, Thomas Day, Matthew Boulton, James Watt and Richard Lovell Edgeworth. William Hutton was also in touch with the ‘Lunatics’ and hence not merely with advanced scientific, religious, educational and political ideas but with a new sense of the shifting balance of social and ...”

“... to Inglis because the family had already given his papers to the Welsh historian, Dai Smith), or the records of the organisations in which he worked – John McIlroy, in his fine study of Williams in adult education, the basis of Inglis’s Chapters 6 and 7, though he contrives not to mention it in his acknowledgments, draws liberally on the ...”

“... patriarchal story back to Adam, which makes us all Sons of Man, if not of David in particular. Matthew starts with Abraham and arranges the ancestors in three neat groups: fourteen generations from Abraham to David; fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon; fourteen from the exile to the Christ. The two gospels are in concordance between Abraham and ...”

“... in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins ...”

“... from getting worse. To complete the cast of characters, and to promote continuity, we have Colonel Matthew Maddox, an honourable Englishman and the subject of an assassination attempt in book one, The Killing of Yesterday’ s Children, winkled out of Berkshire by a brigadier who tells him that his country needs him – needs him, in fact, to liaise with the ...”

“... a kind of literary quilt, and also that names, if they are made up of ordinary terms (word, smith, gold, worth), may revert without warning to their ordinary life.Wordsworth doesn’t juggle with his name as other writers do: Shakespeare, for example, has plenty of fun with will, and Donne, speaking of the forgiveness of sins, writes: ‘When thou hast ...”

“... just ‘because the Germans mucked up twice in a century’. The soi-disant anti-elitist tribune Matthew Goodwin – who ate pages of his own book on Sky News after losing a bet he had made about Labour’s 2017 general election performance – claimed that over the last fifty years ‘the left’ had successfully prioritised ‘the interests of big business ...”