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“... One of these books is very long and the other is very short. Each in its own way is a wonderful piece of work. They stand at opposite ends of the century that runs from the 1740s to the 1840s, but they may be thought to bear each other out, in ways which affect an understanding of the family life of that time, and of its incorporation in the literature of Romanticism – that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple self and can be referred to as the literature of romantic duality ...”

“... have dwelled on Grey’s love of homely nature: his passion for fly-fishing and bird-watching, his long weekends in Hampshire, his occasional quotations from Wordsworth. A famous photograph shows him in country clothes with a robin perched on his hat. This lifelong rusticity led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime ...”

“... died. The second, Anne, was born with a hare lip and a cleft palate, and had the first of a long series of operations when she was only two weeks old. By 1914 Humbert had been transferred a step upwards to William Beveridge’s new Labour Exchange Department, the inception of social security in Britain. Rejected (because of his weak lungs) by the ...”

“... the French foreign minister. When the news reached Dubrovnik, the bells rang ‘all morning long’ according to a ten-year-old American girl staying in the city. ‘Everybody spoke in an undertone except the roosters and my brother.’ The children’s mother hung an academic gown in the window as a makeshift flag of mourning. Their father, Milman ...”

“... Extinction Rebellion, several of whose UK members are fashion designers, has advocated a year-long boycott of new clothes buying and in September held a ‘funeral for fashion week’. The designer Katharine Hamnett, who has long backed radical reforms to labour practices and the sourcing of materials, believes that ...”

“... tone of the novels – which they shared with Evelyn Waugh’s novels, though in a minor key. Pamela Flitton comes to mind as an ATS driver at the War Office, with her ‘Stuff the Ambassador’, or the picture of her, ‘standing by the car, surveying the street with her usual look of hatred and despair’. I wish the old note were sounded again in these ...”

“... scandalous: very few people, and even fewer academics, ever publicly admit to being bored by long novels, to skimming them, or to skipping to passages which seem more interesting. Samuel Johnson’s admission that there were few books he felt compelled to read all the way through might license us to think of the length of Richardson’s novels as an ...”

“... on the inner life from the Puritan tradition of spiritual self-inspection? Why were Richardson’s long and in some ways cumbrous novels – which were both enabled and constrained by their epistolary form – so successful? There was nothing parochial about Watt’s inquiries, despite the modest focus announced in his subtitle. In trying to pin down the ...”

“... Jean Simmons went to the Welsh actor Donald Houston. Houston was blond and wholesome, and had a long career, much of it in B-movies; it’s interesting to think that John Osborne might have enjoyed it in his stead. Osborne as the fourth intern in Doctor in the House, alongside Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More and Donald Sinden ... Osborne as a Spartan, as a rugby ...”

“... in 1954 in the Proceedings of La Société Néo-Philologiquc de Helsinki. The English, who had long realised that it was wrong to say ‘toilet’, were now supplied with lists of shibboleths with which to torment one another. (Addicts of the joke will be interested to observe that in per-Noblesse Oblige letters, there are many non-U usages, such as ...”

“... 113 and 112 numbered fragments, not one of which contains paragraph breaks, many less than a page long – citations included – producing, at the bottom of each dense block of text, an area of blank space. ‘An illustrator named Pere Joan told me the important thing with comics was to know how to read the white space between the panels,’ Mallo writes at ...”

“... chummed up with Henry Fairlie, Paul Johnson, George Gale, Kingsley Amis and many of his other life-long boon companions, whose tales of debauch and dun and infidelity are the salt of the book. He had nice manners, and a generous style which he probably didn’t think of as democratic. He was aware of always being obliged to say the unsayable, but the pose ...”

“... had largely to depend on conversations with Ivy’s two surviving sisters, old ladies who for long had scarcely met their celebrated relative from one year’s end to the other, but who had some acquaintance with the books and were perhaps not unnaturally prone to hear in them echoes from a distant past. For the present volume the situation has been ...”

“... year saw the publication of the first of six volumes of his letters, also immaculately edited by Pamela Clemit. The volume starts in 1778, when Godwin took up his first post as a dissenting minister, through the publication of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice in 1793 and The Adventures of Caleb Williams the following year, and ends shortly after the ...”

“... as the office pub for the staffs of both newspapers. Shaped rather like a railway carriage (i.e. long and narrow), it had a small spit-and-sawdust bar at the front, where genuine inky printers sank pints of bitter. Only one journalist was allowed into this bar, along with his guests. He was Mr Arthur Christiansen, the legendary editor of the Daily ...”