“... The Victorian invention of the lobby correspondent, a role filled by men like William White or Henry Lucy, brought parliamentary debates alive for the newspaper reader. The correspondents usually did this by dwelling on the MPs’ individuality: their mannerisms, their dress, their hobby-horses. This humanised the institution and undermined radical ...”

“... to turn to, still is perhaps, if you wished to point to a sculpture of essences. It was (until Henry Moore) the cartoonist’s favoured notion of modern sculpture – in 1926 the New Yorker published a drawing by Helen Hokinson of two toqued ladies circling a Bird in Space, shaping themselves to its undulating line. Sculpture as essence, sculpture as pure ...”

“... of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.’After Hitler came to power it soon became clear that the Comintern directive t0 national communist parties to adopt a sectarian ultra-leftist strategy wasn’t working, and that some form of co-operation with other parties was necessary to counter the fascist threat. In July 1935 the ...”

“... Milly disappears behind them.’ Yet she had no self-confidence, none of the lordly conviction of Henry James or James Joyce; she awaited both reviews and the comments of her friends in a perfect pathos of fear and trembling, and each new attempt at a book was wholly tentative and unsure. Her ideas were all in the form of an attack on existing fictional ...”

“... and then harden around us as the lost hours progress and we feel their unfreedom accrete. Henry James was snooty about Hardy, but I wonder how James would have done, if given as a kind of literary test a cow’s udder to describe? Admirably, no doubt, with his usual lyrical paradox of oddly precise euphemism, but certainly without the solidity of ...”

“... it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but this was not to become the standard ...”

“... philosopher who in several books and a great many essays has advanced a thesis about the cognitive power of emotions. Feeling, she says, is part of thought. Only accidents of usage and the rationalist prepossessions of modern philosophy could have made us think otherwise. Her evidence covers a wide range, from Plato and Aristotle to Proust and ...”

“... Company in 1660. History has, until recently, neglected British queens consort – apart from Henry VIII’s wives or the ‘agent of corruption’, Henrietta Maria, consort of Charles I. Meanwhile, histories of the Restoration are still dominated by Charles the ‘merry monarch’: mistresses in tow, keen on jokes and blessed with the common touch. He ...”

“... a complete mistake. He thinks Foucault a brilliant failure: that Foucault’s talk of ‘power’ is, in the end, as empty as Heidegger’s talk of ‘Being’. So he is likely to be read as confirming the opinions of blimpish know-nothings. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity will be cited as evidence that we can safely ignore all those ...”

“... are laced with a sometimes murderous aggression. Almost all relationships in their world are power struggles, spiced from time to time with a sadistic delight in making others suffer and a masochistic drive to self-immolation. Charlotte’s Villette is full of such erotic perversities. Apart from Anne Brontë’s writings, there is nothing moderate or ...”

“... insecurity, and the demands of her luckless or feckless dependents. She wanted independence and power, but couldn’t do without safety and affection. ‘There is only one goodness – the surrendered will,’ she has one of her spiritually embattled characters say on his deathbed. Mary Ward believed that, but could no more surrender her own rampant will ...”

“... It’s hard to tell; it’s always hard to tell with this author. It’s at the centre of his power that his mood, his people’s mood, the mood of his writing, is inte0rogative. And in best Modernist fashion, these interrogations don’t have straight answers. So can the style of an evil man – those fallen aestheticians Banville is drawn to, the ...”

“... This is not all, however: O’Keefe draws plentifully on the great Victorian social scientist Sir Henry Maine for many of his ideas about the origins of Roman and traditional law and custom. Money, for example, did not acquire first its potency and then its magic. The power of money can be traced back to primitive ...”

“... breath perfum’d that breedeth love by smelling.’ Spenser shared this belief in the erotic power of body odour, comparing his beloved’s head and bosom to a sweet-smelling garden: ‘Such fragrant flowres doe give most odorous smell,/but her sweet odour did them all excel.’None of this appears in Robert Muchembled’s Smells, whose lively account is ...”

“... She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of Henry IV, published in 1600 – a text almost certainly derived from Shakespeare’s autograph. The fuller text can therefore be taken either as evidence of revision, or as suggesting that the printers of the Quarto for some reason omitted the italicised ...”