“... close proximity of death that he thinks the market requires, and Kellas treats his text as little more than the springboard that will eventually launch him to a movie and video-game deal. The two books, call them Descent and Rising, have an odd, uneasy relationship with each other. On the one hand, the excerpts from Rising serve to call attention to ...”

“... for years, to tea … Wilde would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest possible things to Ford Madox Brown, who … sat on the other side of the fire in another high-backed chair and, stretching out towards the flames his other hand, disagreed usually ...”

“... composers, including Martial Solal, Paul Misraki and Georges Delerue. But there was sometimes so little dialogue that his assistants wondered what the actors were supposed to do. ‘On va dilater,’ he would tell them – ‘We’re going to stretch out’ – like a jazz musician discussing how to improvise on the basis of a sketch. According to Bernard ...”

“... broken-down actor of the type one meets in railway trains or boarding houses’. His battles are little studied professionally. Only those tireless tourists, the Japanese, regularly visit his tacky, Napoleon-sized mausoleum in Norfolk, Virginia, built as part of a murky property deal by a crooked mayor who was later murdered. We still don’t know what to ...”

“... Pocket Book of 1906. His Clark Lectures of 1953, his last sustained composition, showed how little two wars had affected his creed. He defended Scott as the great social historian who had made Carlyle and Macaulay possible, vindicated Shelley against Arnold, and preached a religion of poetry: ‘It is joy, joy in our inmost hearts. It is a passion like ...”

“... doomed Edith Granger becomes Mrs Dombey with no authorial word on what she is wearing (though the little girls watching from the street memorise her attire and dress up their dolls to match it). Dickens does, however, describe the bridegroom’s over-vivid outfit, and perhaps that will do for a warning. Hughes notes that Thackeray’s non-hero is similarly ...”

“... out to include tags such as hinc illae lachrymae. Such items of internal evidence are worth very little, as Furbank and Owens contend: but not all ‘phrases and stylistic tricks’ fall into the same category. The author of the 1715 pamphlet uses the phrase ‘Quondam Chancellor’ of exactly the same figure as does Oldmixon in pamphlets of the same ...”

“... falling far short of the standard set for the series by Renée Winegarten’s excellent little book on Madame de Stael. In so short a text, Gertrude’s involvement with the anti-suffragists hardly deserves a chapter to itself, while the intricacies of Mesopotamian politics, which she helped unravel, require more careful treatment.Nevertheless Ms ...”

“... in England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the ‘Jacobin’ underground. With Arthur O’Connor and others, he was arrested when about to board ship for France, and a sensationally seditious address was found in his pocket, welcoming a French invasion in support of British liberty. It led to a dramatic ‘state trial’ and there was much ...”

“... was surrounded, clubbed, impaled with lances, shot with arrows, then scalped. Rachel took her little boy James and began to run, but, as she wrote after her release, ‘a large sulky looking Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down.’ Silas Parker went for his bag of shot and was soon killed, as were the other men who remained in the fort trying to ...”

“... all just ‘crackpot stuff’.After the trouble with the memoir, I tried to bring her out of it a little, and threw a dinner for her at the Café Loup on 13th Street. She was in one of her moods when she arrived and told me I was shallow for having asked so many intellectuals and snobs who didn’t talk the way she talked or see the world ‘plainly’. For ...”

“... strong for disliking the editors of the Times Literary Supplement (successively Alan Pryce-Jones, Arthur Crook and John Gross) and indeed held the whole London literary world in contempt as a self-serving clique. He became a lecturer in 1936, already over forty, and a full lecturer at 52. MacKillop deals with this scandalously slow ascent in great detail and ...”

“... political activities from the rest of his life is useful, though it is peculiar to hear so little of his other commitments. The Furbank and Owens narrative is certainly counter-literary. It ends in 1720, when Defoe, according to them, ‘turned his back on politics’. Robinson Crusoe apart, his novels are still to come. Richetti has some of the same ...”

“... soon as a decade became a label, there were people who did not wish to have it stuck to them – Arthur Machen, the magus of the fantastic, although a paid-up member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, insisted to the end of his days that he was ‘no part of the 90s’. Others welcomed the affiliation. The 1930s poets owed their instant celebrity to their ...”

“... Tale of the Heike, newly translated by Royall Tyler. Tyler is the most prominent translator since Arthur Waley and Edward Seidensticker to take on the Sisyphean task of rendering Japan’s vast classical literature into accessible English. The Tale of the Heike is an especially challenging work for Western audiences. The Tale of Genji, with its eerily ...”