“... delectable quotations. It draws not only on family documents, but on the writings of Macaulay, Emily Eden, Lady Canning, Bishop Heber, Kipling, Diana Cooper and Forster; and it comments, sometimes with disfavour, on films like Gandhi, The Far Pavilions and The Jewel in the Crown. If a book on this scale had been written by an American it would have carried ...”

“... your lamp, there citron to nibbleAnd coffee dribble … Frost is in the stubble.Then came Edmund Wilson’s essay ‘Flaubert’s Politics’, which ends with this sentence: ‘As the first big cracks begin to show in the structure of the 19th century, [Flaubert] shifts his complaint to the shortcomings of humanity, for he is unable to believe in, or even to ...”

“... rebel against American Puritanism, accused of believing in free love), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson and the suffragette leader, Carrie Chapman Catt. Feminist supporter of minority rights, Eleanor Roosevelt is our contemporary. That is what worries Alan Brinkley. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Eleanor Roosevelt is the representative of social movements ...”

“... of the Sherif of Mecca. Backed to the hilt by Cox, she won her battles with the formidable A.T. Wilson, who wanted tighter British control. She was thus instrumental not only in establishing King Feisal’s Iraq, but indirectly Saddam Hussein’s, a state with a predominantly secular outlook ruled by the Sunni Arab minority, now fighting for its life ...”

“... more than her mother. She studied at the Slade under the all-powerful trinity of Frederick Brown, Wilson Steer and Tonks. It was 1910, and the students were advised not to attend Roger Fry’s Post-Expressionist exhibition. By 1914 Carrington, a mild bohemian, had cut her hair short, Mark Gertler and C.W. Nevinson were in love with her, and the world outside ...”

“... Instead, she preferred what Sloane Crosley calls the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of Elinor Glyn, Emily Post and Winnie the Pooh, at whose insistent whimsy ‘Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up’. The main draw was always Parker herself. Never mind the book, what readers wanted to know was that she’d hurled it across the room or assessed it as ‘second only to ...”

“... Something else that catches the eye, given where things were headed, is that his mother, Emily, played the cello. Russell was no Glenn Gould-style prodigy, but he does seem to have wilfully set his own course from very early on. ‘He was ahead of his age in the things he cared about,’ according to his sister Kate, ‘and that led to all kinds of ...”

“... United States in the year following its publication – even such serious-minded critics as Edmund Wilson and the young Lionel Trilling regularly disparaged her as spinsterish, middlebrow and reactionary: a kind of tiresome maiden aunt in the back parlour of American letters. True, Cather had her defenders – but as Acocella grimly notes, they were prone to ...”

“... mixture of the homely and exotic. She has acquired the honorary but eccentric status of an Emily Dickinson, telling it slant. This oblique trance is my natural Way of speaking, she claims, and this is indeed how her poetic personality comes across: dreamy, meditative, in the world but not quite of it. Selima Hill has some of the same ambivalence ...”

“... Matilda was never quite right after a fall into a coal-scuttle as a child, and would embarrass Emily (who had been engaged to Arthur Hallam) by raising her umbrella in church to keep off the draught. Since the crowded rectory had plenty of books as well as many peculiar persons, it provided an atmosphere conducive to poetry. But no less helpful were the ...”

“... of the proceedings or the jurisdiction of the judges. Prison radicalised many still further. Laura Wilson, a worsted-coating weaver from Halifax told a reporter: ‘I went to jail a rebel, but I have come out a regular terror.’ Despite the ground it shared with other suffrage organisations, and despite its male supporters, the WSPU was unique as a separatist ...”

“... hotel – ‘distraught’ and ‘in wet clothes’. My italics. The prodigality reminds me of Emily Dickinson: As if I asked a common Alms, And in my wondering hand A Stranger pressed a Kingdom, And I, bewildered, stand – Then there is the little, optionally extra dog taking ‘rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf’, or Laughter in ...”

“... I remember The hyacinth garden. Those are pearls that were his eyes, yes! In other words, as G. Wilson Knight first pointed out in 1972, the ‘hyacinth girl’ was initially conceived as male and, like Phlebas, appears to have drowned, or so the section’s concluding quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das ...”

“... unlike William Wilde, who by the time of his marriage had had two further illegitimate children, Emily and Mary, born in 1847 and 1849, who were taken care of as wards by William’s eldest brother, Ralph. (John Butler Yeats believed that the mother of these two girls kept a ‘black oak shop’ in Dublin.) William fully acknowledged his illegitimate ...”

“... twenty pages the presiding genius is in any case not strictly speaking Victorian at all, being Emily Dickinson: who for Davie represents those qualities which in the earlier part of the anthology shine in Herbert and Vaughan, Watts and Wesley, Smart and Cowper. That none of these writers has the obvious ‘scale’ or bulk of a Browning is perhaps to ...”