“... of perfect enlightenment. As a way of presenting scientific history, however, it is anathema to James Secord. His method is to investigate almost everything to do with Vestiges except its actual content. He looks, for example, at its contemporary readership to show how different social circles constructed their own interpretation of the book. Each group ...”

“... a literary Rolodex on the page. Along with Auden, there are mentions of Shelley, Larkin, Forster, James and others. Sullivan’s handling of them has a curious effect. They’re neither looming nor vital. Like statues in the park, they’re just there. The looser second section of the poem consists of dissolve after dissolve in which being ‘half aware’ is ...”

“... not forget the splendours of that heyday, in Bath: ‘The most fashionable library before 1800 was James Marshall’s in Milsom Street, where from 1793 to 1799 the mostly aristocratic and upper-class subscribers included two princes (the Prince of Wales and Frederick, Prince of Orange), five dukes, four duchesses, seven earls, 14 countesses, many other nobles ...”

“... and whose life history was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the ...”

“... to his studio with a snapshot of this young Galway woman who (he said) had eloped with his son James to Paris some eighteen years before. Mossy agreed to copy the photograph in oils, two feet by 18 inches, unframed, for the usual flat rate of five quid, ten bob down, the rest on delivery, asked the usual questions, colour of hair, auburn, colour of ...”

“... the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of universal libertinism in the 18th century, much of it ‘under the aegis of a benevolent Nature’, which raises as many questions as it makes statements. Some of the claims for unfettered fornication – a Scottish minister maintained ...”

“... have any choice. Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Mary Lamb, Alice James, Anna O., Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath are household names. Not everyone may be able instantly to identify Henriette Cornier (who in 1825 chopped off her 19-month-old charge’s head), or Augustine (Charcot’s ‘model ...”

“... denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is’. The paintings of Fairfield Porter, traditional, carried out in the teeth of Abstract Expressionism, are subjected to a stern interrogation, during which any number of flaws are stigmatised (like Porter’s difficulty with faces) before Updike can allow ...”

“... this sort of browned-off tone does for a good deal of the verse in Bell’s Complete Poems. Peter Porter writes that Bell ‘knew more about poetry than any other writer I have known’, yet the number of Bell’s best poems is small. Clearly he was multi-talented. A stanza from a version of Corbiere shows fine use of form and acoustics. Bell can also have an ...”

“... Ohio, San Diego, Detroit, New York and Salt Lake City. He had also, thanks to his mentor Dr Phil Porter (‘one of homeopathy’s most pre-eminent specialists’), travelled to Berlin, Paris and London as a special correspondent for the American Homeopathic Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. There’s another red flag: never trust a 19th-century male ...”

“... outside it. Fonda has documents in her hand, a newspaper tucked under her arm; behind her is a porter, another kind of (man)bag, with serious luggage. I would like to have seen Hilde Wagner-Ascher’s cotton and metal envelope-style bag, designed nearly a hundred years ago for the Wiener Werkstätte, doing its job in sympathetic surroundings. The canny ...”

“... to sober eyes. But there would be a real liberation in it too. If we wanted to refer to Cole Porter or Philip Marlowe or Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or nightmarish: chacun son ...”

“... out her favourite Hemingway sentences to see how they worked, Later, at Berkeley, she put Henry James and Joseph Conrad on a pedestal with Hemingway and agonised in a short story class with Mark Schorer that she was ‘not good enough’. The 1950s were the glory days of the New Criticism in university English departments, but Didion rejected ...”

“... history began with the proposition that the Stuart kings were a bad lot, given to homosexuality (James I), extravagance (Charles I), excessive wenching (Charles II) and a systematic attempt to debauch our ancient liberties and betray us into the hands of the Pope and Louis XIV (Charles II and James II). The enforced ...”

“... drawing by Larry Rivers, freeze him in a pose of brooding nobility, small and tough like Keats. (James Schuyler mourned: ‘even your lines have/a broken nose,’ a kind of translation of Leigh Hunt’s description of his doomed friend – ‘He had a face in which energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed up.’) ‘Frank’ has become shorthand for ...”