“... I went​ to Henry Poole & Co, the oldest tailor on Savile Row, for a fitting. Suits start at £5500, and I couldn’t afford to have one made, but the firm had agreed to teach me the principles of bespoke tailoring by measuring me for an invisible one, so I could at least engage in the fantasy: the emperor’s new clothes ...”

“... in for ‘sniping’. If you want a good book on dedications, look out for a second-hand copy of Henry B. Wheatley’s The Dedication of Books to Patron and Friend: A Chapter of Literary History (1887). Room lists it in his brief bibliography, so in plundering it he could be accused of plagiarism only by those who believe that there is such a thing as ...”

“... to Syrie Wellcome, Dr Barnardo’s daughter and the former wife of the pharmaceutical millionaire Henry Wellcome, it was a disaster. She twice used the threat of pregnancy to entrap him (the second time Maugham should surely have seen it coming – unless he wanted to be forced into marriage) and was, according to Hastings, ‘frivolous, selfish and ...”

“... unique form of self-therapy. Dickens explores himself through it and Lawrence cures his sickness; Hardy assuages his Biblical ‘astonishment and fear’ at the horror of life: Jane Austen overcomes helplessness, malice and contempt. Fiction had also taken over the sermon. From George Eliot to the present day, bossing the reader about with your own view of ...”

“... from Moretti’s taxonomy. How would his system cope with, say, Daniel Deronda or the novels of Henry James? Or, in a different register, with the novels of Tolstoy or Hardy (the latter gets only one footnoted sentence on Jude the Obscure)? In the case of Tolstoy and Hardy there is, I ...”

“... Auden). They will dictate to puppet biographers the ‘true’ story of their lives (like Hardy or Nabokov). The most determined will arrange to disappear from the face of the earth, like Thomas Pynchon, a major force in modern fiction who is, to all biographical intents and purposes, a cipher. The morbid secretiveness of authors as a class ...”

“... like Larkin or Housman manages unexpectedly to strike an all-responsive chord; when, in fine, as Henry James would say, by exciting themselves they excite others. Like the higher pornography, the higher self-pity – vital to any bestseller – is an important ingredient in Larkin’s popularity. There is nothing specialised about the excitement. One does ...”

“... his face looked ‘dreary’, he had his hair cut ‘back to front’ in the manner of Olivier’s Henry V. Thereafter, realising he was photogenic, he posed relentlessly for photographs, drawings, busts and at least one portrait in stumpwork. His style eventually became so recognisable that Craig Brown suggested his entire face, glasses, nose and ...”

“... Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and ...”

“... was 17, Britten went to church in Lowestoft and heard ‘quite a fine sermon’ by the Rev. Thomas Henry Stanley, who was standing in for the incumbent, the Rev. William Reeve. Reeve was away – in case you care, he was in Blankenberghe, Belgium. On August Bank Holiday in that year Britten went to see a show with Paul Robeson in it; a supporting act was ‘a ...”

“... American who had likewise profited and who had then become – as Eliot would – an Englishman: Henry James. ‘The fact of being everywhere a foreigner was probably an assistance to his native wit.’ And Donald Davie, who everywhere has his native wits about him, has he profited much from living abroad? In half-praise of George Steiner, Davie floats ‘a ...”

“... he says. And: ‘What did I know of life, who had lived so carefully?’ There are echoes of Hardy here, who wrote a poem beginning ‘For life I had never cared greatly,’ and of James, whose ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ is the tale of a man who missed his life by living it the way he did. But Barnes goes one subtle step further. One can wish to ...”

“... as a hysteric and failing to wear a seat belt). With a better education, she might have liked Hardy and read Foucault with interest. ‘She won’t go quietly, that’s the problem,’ Diana said to 15 million people in the Panorama interview, slipping naturally into the third person. It was more like a trailer than a warning. Still, you wonder, is there ...”

“... Mentation was all. This phase of Miller’s career was astonishingly productive. For him as for Henry James, Europe made literature discutable. Always fluent, Miller now erupted with articles, books, essays and reviews – almost always prefaced with genuflection to the European sages who had inspired him. Miller has retained two features in his work that ...”

“... The principle that ‘perpetuity’ was forbidden existed before and throughout the reign of Henry VIII. ‘The mischief that would arise to the public,’ a Master of the Rolls later said, ‘from estates remaining for ever or for a long time inalienable or untransferable [would be] a damp to industry and a prejudice to trade.’ The mischief caused by ...”