“... a grocer’s shop,’ declares the impeccably fogeyish hero of Gissing’s The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903), ‘and see in the window a display of foreign butter. This is the kind of thing that makes one gloom over the prospects of England. The deterioration of English butter is one of the worst signs of the moral state of our people.’ Eighty ...”

“... do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the closing pages of Clive James’s Brilliant Creatures, whose author-hero is said to be a ‘chapter of accidents’, and in the title and precarious plot of Anthony Powell’s O, How the wheel becomes it! The wheel is Ophelia’s, and suggests the incessant circlings of fortune, but ...”

“... want to overdetermine to the point of absurdity, but it seems fairly obvious that what Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He ...”

“... than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say.’ Henry James’s fear that what the tourist has known and loved and already thought perfect in Venice might alter is a familiar sentiment: we all know this longing for things to remain as they were when we first knew them. The same might be said of our ...”

“... contracts a number of marriages and meets just about everyone worth meeting. Anthony Powell and Henry Green are his contemporaries at Oxford; he takes tea with Ottoline Morrell and twits Virginia Woolf. Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh are London acquaintances. Picasso sketches his portrait, Hemingway is a fellow war correspondent, and Paris brings a meeting ...”

“... Her whole life was shaped by her mother’s straightforwardness and bravery in a crisis: when Henry VIII wanted Katherine to accept that she had never been married to him, she refused to do so, and by her unchanging refusal, gave her daughter an example of how to behave. Mary spent her life trying to undo the wrong done to her mother and her mother’s ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... out of it, or the title of the second anyway. Finn. Finnegan. It was here on 10 June 1904 that James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, who worked in the hotel. The two young strangers who had locked eyes stopped to talk, and they arranged to meet four days later outside the house where Sir William Wilde, eye surgeon to the queen in Ireland, if she should have ever ...”

“... on bringing out one new book after another, no matter how fine a steam rises from the dome of James Wood. (Writing in the New Republic, Wood welcomed Updike’s bestseller Terrorist into the world by wishing it had been aborted: ‘John Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject – at least as soon as he saw the results on the ...”

“... to fictional treatment by any of the subtler practitioners of her day. Jane always wanted William James to teach at Stanford, and he did finally agree to come (though he arrived after her death). He didn’t much enjoy his time there: ‘every lecture a dead weight’, he wrote to his daughter as the semester dragged on. It was too bad Jane hadn’t included ...”

“... whirling before she was born. Probably, her real father was the angelically handsome seducer Henry Cust, who played tennis in the nude. Her mother, Violet, Duchess of Rutland, sculpted so well that Rodin compared her with Donatello. Watts said she drew like Holbein. But the first thing to say about Violet was that she was supremely beautiful. (Had she ...”

“... and honest and sober’ would win riches. He left the inevitable corollary to preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher: ‘If men have not enough it is from want of provident care, and foresight, and industry and frugality. No man in this land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his sin.’ This moral economy nourishes a ...”

“... to royal progresses. Festivity could be used to serve political purposes too, as Elizabeth I and James I realised: they resurrected older festive traditions or invented new ones, developing them into cults and electing themselves as the chief divinities. In his discussion of periodic jollifications Laroque is judicious, superbly informed and meticulous; he ...”

“... There is Hilary the hard-bitten tabloid columnist. Roddy the heartless art-dealing seducer, Henry the free-market ideologue, Dorothy the profit-mad agriculturalist. As a dynasty, however, these men and women belong to another literary and temporal mode entirely – to the spoof Gothic fiction of Winshaw Towers, with its cartoon-like turrets and ...”

“... an attempt to diminish the opulent magnificence of the Mughal court. Yet he was the ambassador of James VI and I, who had advised his heir, Prince Henry, in Basilicon Doron (1599) that ‘a king is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people gazingly do behold.’Ten months after the audience ...”