“... of a sex-maniac’. The 18-year-old heroine, Judith Earle, over-earnest and inexperienced, is a little in love with all the members of the family who come to live next door, and madly in love with one of them, Roddy. The first part of the book is a long retrospective, the story of Judith’s first meeting with the Fyfes and of her own childhood. Lehmann was ...”

“... Paul Johnson’s book is lively, well-informed and often provocative; his standpoint allows little space for nuances. His ‘crucial developments’ are the troubles themselves; the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who volunteered for service in the British Army even after the Easter Rising in 1916) occur only at the ...”

“... it was Tom, who had not a tithe of the intellectual power of his brother Matthew, or of Arthur Clough, who alone gained Firsts in Mods and Greats. His friends and relatives despaired of his habit of ruining his worldly chances by a constitutional impulsiveness of character, beginning with his decision to emigrate to New Zealand at the age of 24 when ...”

“... he offers up is fanciful, contrived. Like Marshall Walker’s dutiful assemblage of notecards (‘Arthur Miller studies the relation between society and the individual in terms of three clearly identifiable themes’), it assumes an orderly progression of influence, of decades and periods, of regional writers and schools and themes, of a ‘usable ...”

“... far worse than to be thought of as no good. Not that he lacked literary vanity. He monitored the little magazines as fiercely as he checked out the mass-market press. And he was forever getting into literary quarrels, taking offence, taking revenge. He fought with the exiting Georgians; he fought with the incoming highbrow avant-garde. Osbert wanted – and ...”

“... a 19th-century cowboy paraphrasing Swift (‘They’d been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man’s appearance’); eerier still to see a distorted after-image of King Lear set loose in a Western desert, ‘like some scurrilous king stripped of his vesture and driven together with his fool into the wilderness to die’. In another cultural ...”

“... was lucky to have Robert, but then Charlotte Brontë was perhaps equally lucky to have had Arthur Nicholls. Had Charlotte lived, she might have continued to write good things as private woman and happy spouse, blissfully submitting her letters and manuscripts to her husband’s censorship. Elizabeth was also, in a sense, a conscious and loving ...”

“... in their allegiances than most of us? It seems impossible even to guess intelligently but there is little evidence that they were. It is the twenty-odd years before the First World War that most catch the eye. This was when the Apostles were something like a recruiting agency for what we loosely call Bloomsbury, but what we ought perhaps to acknowledge as a ...”

“... that Béraud was genuine. Not long afterwards, Marthe Béraud confessed to trickery. She had little option: a newspaper had found the servant who’d played the spirit she summoned – that of Bien Boa, a courtly and richly moustachioed 16th-century Brahmin. Not for the first time, Richet refused to admit that what he had witnessed was a trick, and the ...”

“... foreword, intro and preface as if I hadn’t made them yet. Gautier’s extended polemic has very little to do with the novel itself. It was, in fact, written to lengthen the total text so that it might be issued in two volumes, and would have been better called a fusillade. His attack on the utilitarian character of the bourgeoisie came to be regarded, after ...”

“... department where he was employed, and a few other things. There is no new philosophy here, and little news about the opinions, or even the development of ideas, of either author. It is symptomatic that the editor begins the book with an imaginary dialogue of his own composition, in which the protagonists are named ‘Lakatos’ and ‘Feyerabend’. It is ...”

“... early reviews must have made depressing reading for a beleaguered poet. Everybody remembers that Arthur Waugh likened the work of Eliot to the Spartan custom of exhibiting a drunken slave to show young men ‘the ignominious folly’ of debauchery. (Pound replied that he would like to make an anthology of the work of drunken helots or Heliots, if he could ...”

“... written about so often by Vidal’s guests and interviewers, and by Vidal himself, that there is little to say that hasn’t been said. It is a beautiful place, if you like houses perched on cliffs, with an epic view of the Tyrrhenian Sea (somewhere in the hazy distance south of Salerno are the remains of the Greek settlement at Paestum). If you don’t like ...”

“... In The Crisis of 1614, essays by Jonathan Gibson and Stephen Clucas show Ralegh’s cousin Sir Arthur Gorges adapting Lucan’s verse history of Rome’s civil wars, and Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Cotton rewriting the reign of Henry III, with an eye to Jacobean political anxieties. Cotton was among the most learned historians of his time. Yet his account ...”

“... picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his shoulder; Sir Joshua has his ear ...”