“... even cosy, and I suspect that critics, who have given Osborne such a consistently hard time for so long, heaved a sigh of relief at this autobiography, since it was something, to quote another John’s spoof of Dorothy L. Sayers, ‘to be read behind closed doors’. Though without necessarily taking Orton’s other piece of advice – namely, to ‘have a ...”

“... into an engraving of a country house and park of circa 1700 in which we overhear a scene from Pamela, and then becomes a painting by Richard Wilson with figures from Peregrine Pickle. Thereafter we are led through Gainsborough’s Forest with a guest appearance by Sterne, Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, a John Martin and a Turner, with ...”

“... happens in this favola intreccio. Arcadia, part of a vaguely defined Greek confederation, has for long been peacefully governed by Duke Basilius, who, misled by the Delphic oracle, goes against the advice of his trusty counsellor, Philamax, and abdicates (or takes a year’s pastoral sabbatical), while locking up his daughters, ...”

“... account is devoted to the novelist’s mother. Sadleir sneers at Frances Wright: ‘one of that long line of earnest, noisy women whose cacophanous reformism echoes down the 19th century’. ‘Astoundingly’, Wright’s utopian visions fired Thomas Trollope: ‘from the wild talk of Frances Wright sprang Thomas Trollope’s crowning lunacy – a scheme to ...”

“... he says, to establish ‘the persistence … of the old comic representations of low life’, and long lines of transmission can often be traced. Fielding, who outraged the critics by plundering contemporary jestbooks, included in Tom Jones the anecdote of a felon mocked from the bench with malevolent puns about hanging, which goes back to a Jacobean ...”

“... among buck hares – a red squirrel among brown nuts.’ Later, when her attachment to Vita was long over, Virginia confided to the composer Ethel Smyth that she ‘didn’t take to Trefusis’. What precisely she didn’t take to was Tandem, a novel that strays haphazardly into the future. Despite many witty passages, it is not one of her better ...”

“... surgeon, and then moved to London. Already there are echoes of fictional heroines (Richardson’s Pamela, Defoe’s Moll Flanders) in her story. Almost nothing is known for certain of her adventures in the period following her arrival in London. Perhaps she was on the staff of a high-class bawdy-house, Mrs Kelly’s. Perhaps she was on the streets. The ...”

“... against ‘the man who invented Fifth Acts’, and although his five-act comedies enjoyed long and lucrative runs (Fielding made nearly a thousand pounds from The Modern Husband, according to Aaron Hill, and lost it all at cards), he only regained his creative stride when he returned to the improvisatory chaos of farce in 1736-37 with the politically ...”

“... College at Dartmouth. The course had been reduced from the usual three months for him, but it was long enough for Charles to realise that seafaring was yet another area in which he and his father had nothing in common. Prince Philip had a distinguished naval career. His son struggled with navigation, which he found confusing, and he didn’t much like the ...”

“... of the affiliations among starving, writing and imprisonment. Like Clarissa, the prisoners in Long Kesh hoped their wasting away would serve as an edifying spectacle, and like her, they achieved their end principally by recording the event in writing. While Richardson’s heroine is deservedly famous for the sheer scale on which she managed to carry out ...”

“... and wit. Watch it now and it seems inconceivable that it could have been marginalised for so long. As many of the contributions to The Cinema of Powell and Pressburger, a collection of essays and appreciations, attest, the directors have for too long been regarded as ‘avant-garde filmmakers within the ...”

“... and with the rest of the school streaming behind, she bounced in her pin-striped suit down the long drive to Matins at the village church. On Sunday evenings the three top forms would take their sewing into her study and we would sit on the floor while she read us long Sunday-evening kind of books. I remember ...”

“... but it has still managed to produce leaders whom, whatever their flaws, we can only respect. Not a long list, but one to which it would be fair to add the Dalai Lama, although unfortunately he disqualifies himself by revealing that he is not a bona fide 20th-century figure, but the 14th reincarnation of a personage who has been playing his part in history ...”

“... Furies were christened ‘the Kindly Ones’ in the same spirit. Her activities rivalled those of Pamela Widmerpool in Anthony Powell’s novel series; before Connolly, King Farouk had been one of her conquests, and she was to abandon Cyril for George Weidenfeld. During the war Cyril at his office had been cherished and supported by at least two devoted ...”

“... expanding market, and the whiff of scandal associated with novels, only partly displaced by the Pamela cult of sentimental virtue, could be both disavowed and enjoyed when books were written by and for the French. But after Werther, and not least because of its success, many more German books were made over into English. The novel is made up of letters ...”