“... no flagrantly unconventional union of the Lewes-Eliot kind. Trollope did not, like Wilkie Collins, steep himself in laudanum and keep two mistresses. He did not, like Bulwer Lytton, lock his wife in a lunatic asylum. He did not die tragically young like the Brontës or poor, like Charles Lever. He did not become Prime Minister of England, like ...”

“... not the martyr of liberty he became in death. Where Baker wants to dismantle the myth of Marat, Thomas Crow wants to indulge in it, through a close reading of David’s Marat at His Last Breath. Speaking in the convention on 14 July, the day after the assassination, David, a Jacobin deputy and ‘pageant master of the revolution’, promised to commemorate ...”

“... minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen – poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples, Mr Collins’s ‘Collins’, the comedy of the infinitely small. It cannot have been simply a class limitation, or a limitation of experience, that intimidated his pen. It was a resolve, very American, to scrape his sacred texts ...”

“... in print. The further adventures of Isabella Thorpe, Mrs Rushworth and even the family of Mr Collins; the events of Pride and Prejudice told from Mr Darcy’s point of view; the events of Mansfield Park as seen by a maidservant; a play about Anne De Bourgh’s wedding – no minor character or plot line is left unturned. Austenians not only buy and read ...”

“... began on 8 May 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by its chairman, Parnell Thomas, and its chief investigator, Robert Stripling, ‘set up shop’ at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The first response by the industry to notice of an investigation appeared forthright and dignified. A Committee for the First Amendment was formed, and ...”

“... he had used for his early work. Culliford was the second name of Charles’s maternal uncle, Thomas Barrow, a cultured man who had forbidden Dickens’s father ever again to enter his house after the latter’s failure to honour a debt led to his paying £200 as a guarantor. Dickens identified with this more respectable side of the family and often ...”

“... It is like widows: the longer the old boy is gone the nicer he seems to have been. I think of Thomas Hardy’s first wife. They squabbled for years. He fell in love with another woman, wrote love poems about her. When the first died, and she really was a bit of a heap at the end (she wore boots), he married the second and started writing his love poems to ...”

“... feasible partly because ridiculous. Literary artists have worked in the genre: Poe, Wilkie Collins, Simenon, Chandler and Michael Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the ...”

“... ephemeral’. Withers, like Todd, was more interested in writers and artists than clothes: Dylan Thomas, Kingsley Amis, Bertrand Russell and Simone de Beauvoir all wrote for Vogue under her editorship and she ran features on Gore Vidal, Isherwood, Bacon, Freud and Matisse. She employed Elizabeth David to write on food. And she was a socialist. Her ...”

“... saw themselves as armed militants to the Officials’ political compromisers. For them, Michael Collins had said all there was to say about the value of words in the struggle against the Crown when he gave the oration at the funeral of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike in 1917: ‘That volley which we have just heard ...”

“... whether it’s a work of genius. On the same day, he offers the same tease to Bonham Carter, of Collins Harvill: ‘It is possible that I myself may have a text in England, but it is none too certain, and we had better speak about this orally.’ Again, he claims not to have read it.Publishers can rarely be relied on for their discretion, but why such ...”

“... By the time I got to Belfast and phoned him again the line was dead. 13. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Thomas MacCurtain, a known figure in the IRA, was gunned down at his home on 19 March 1920. The late-night callers were three members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. One of them was later identified as District-Inspector Oswald Swanzy. The Chief Secretary for ...”

“... But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the manuscript notes were ...”