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“... thrown into this weird position,’ Chris writes in her letter. ‘Reactive – like Charlotte Stant to Sylvère’s Maggie Verver, if we were living in … The Golden Bowl.’ When they finish their letters both feel they could do better. They’re ‘delirious and ecstatic’, ‘blissful and exhausted’, ‘finally inhabiting the same space ...”

“... Spadafora’s Scots are well known, almost to the point of ennui: Ferguson, Millar, Hume, Smith, Robertson. But his five Englishmen (who actually include two Welshmen) are not all equally famous. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the ...”

“... taught Scarpetta well’). She was also a ‘prize-winning’ crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer. Which prizes she won is not recorded – almost all the facts about her life come from a few self-serving interviews. There was nothing in Postmortem to indicate anything other than a modest break-even performance in a competitive field. Nor ...”

“... Sensibility and sympathy were the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities more admirable ‘than beneficence and humanity … or whatever proceeds from a tender sympathy with others’ (David Hume). Fashionable poems deplored slavery and child labour, and wrung tears from the public on behalf of the ...”

“... and there is no book on the modern British monarchy comparable in scholarly stature to Denis Mack Smith on the Kings of Italy. Dorothy Thompson’s study of Queen Victoria is thus the more to be welcomed, for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-...”

“... manage, but often ended his day with an impromptu dance in the studio. English mezzotinter John Smith (1652-1742) grew rich and arrogant engraving Godfrey Kneller paintings and towards the end of his career dealt with customers while seated on his close-stool. Gaspard Duchange (1662-1757), ashamed of the erotic prints he’d engraved after Correggio’s ...”

“... been satellite works ranging from Don Quixote Redivivus in 1673, by way of The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox, published in 1752 and just reissued* (not the first gender-bending of the subject, a Madam Quixot appeared in 1678), to my own The Duchess’s Diary of 1980, Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote of 1982, and now Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote ...”

“... is not just appropriate to a poem for children. It is a real question, just as this, from Stevie Smith, is real information: Cool and plain Cool and plain Was the message of love on the window pane. Soft and quiet Soft and quiet It vanished away in the fogs of night. Since the time those poems were written, even poetry for children has become ...”

“... fiction in the Fifties and Sixties. By the time the novel came out, Jean had become Mrs Tilden Smith, and her kind supportive new husband, an impoverished publisher’s reader, helped her with it considerably. The war made her drink even more, although in the alcoholic drought of those days, and having no money anyway, it is a puzzle where she got it from ...”

“... political wisdom? Hard to believe, in a man who appears to have made wrong bets, whether on Ian Smith to survive in Rhodesia or, just to bring it right up to date, the recommended successor to Margaret Thatcher, about whose identity he confesses to having ‘not the slightest doubt’: ‘In a perfect world, I would choose ... Geoffrey Howe.’ There must ...”

“... in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’. Martin Seymour-Smith, reviewing Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my music, you ...”

“... happily about Mr Wickham’s popularity among his fellow militia members. She is talking to Charlotte Lucas when she finds herself ‘suddenly addressed by Mr Darcy who took her so much by surprise in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she did, she accepted him’. ‘Without knowing what she did’: the narrative behaves as if ...”

“... including Carlyle’s corrected proofs for the 1841 edition of Sartor, collected by Norman and Charlotte Strouse and donated to UC Santa Cruz in 1966. Why should Americans be so enthusiastic about Carlyle, particularly Sartor Resartus? In part it is because Carlyle, a prose Romantic born in the same year as Keats, is a spiritual godfather of American ...”

“... In 1864, he won a Snell Exhibition, which had sent many brilliant students – not least Adam Smith – from Glasgow University to Balliol College, Oxford. The high churchmanship of Oxford often unsettled the Presbyterian certainties of the Balliol Scotch; Archibald Campbell Tait, an exhibitioner of a previous generation, even ended up as the archbishop ...”

“... roman; Angela Davis’s struggle typifies the Black Power movement, until you see that it’s Charlotte Corday all over again. Jacqueline Bouvier was born into an age that still thought speaking French was like playing the piano: something upper-class girls did. But French was also a space for her to dream in: the Bouviers were descended from French ...”