“... Dickens’s magical power over his readers has frequently expressed itself in cult objects. For Victorians, the most widely reproduced was probably Luke Fildes’s elegiac picture, The Empty Chair. This image of the vacant authorial throne conveys a sense that there can be no successor to Dickens. Together with the irreparable loss, Fildes’s confident entry into the sanctum sanctorum, the study in the chalet at Gad’s Hill, confirmed the delusive intimacy which reading publics yearn to be reassured they enjoy with their idols ...”

“... them more at ease with each other. Ann Thwaite has in her own oblique way the novelist’s touch. Power schemes of this sort seldom come off, and this one had tragic consequences, bringing its own nemesis. Pure Compton-Burnett in fact. Lionel developed a fever – nothing to worry about, but it got worse. Abscesses on the liver, operations, much ...”

“... Surrealists and anarchists waited to be rescued, but it looked as if only a miracle, or a great power, could help them. In New York, the day after the Armistice, the Emergency Rescue Committee was formed by a group of European refugees and American academics and journalists, with the ambitious aim of saving ‘cultural Europe’. Lion Feuchtwanger was on ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... Thurman, invariably connected human happiness with ‘a voluptuous, feminine pliancy, and with the power of domination – a pleasure that became purer for her with age, and toward which she expresses an infant’s sense of entitlement’. She revelled, in other words, in the frank regressive seizure of the breast – in going after what she wanted without ...”

“... exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.It conjures nightmares of ‘failed states’ and ‘global extremism’, offers the remedies of ‘state-building’ and ...”

“... to a class that, to them, was a strange and wondrous Other, the image and agent of apocalyptic power. Their border-passages were transgressions. They violated social and artistic tabus. Transgression always evokes pious horror among those who, in Auden’s words, ‘would rather be ruined than changed’. But these transgressions were acts of ...”

“... antagonism to Bush’s deliberate pace and prose. Like those establishment figures, epitomised by Henry Kissinger, who are the self-conscious heirs of the Anglo-European conservative tradition in foreign policy, with its emphasis on balance and order, liberal commentators were moved by a sensation of danger impending from a massive convulsion within the ...”

“... superstitions such as inter-ethnic hatred; to cleanse people’s minds not only with the raucous power of coarse ridicule but with the rational, antiseptic aid of modern science, the science that could track the movement of bacilli from lip to icon to lip. But, along with all the other wreckage of the revolutionary project, religion is resurgent in the ...”

“... Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy ...”

“... me like this. You talked Pop into his grave and now you’ll kill me. Go ahead, George, more power to you; at least I’ll be buried in good ground.’ Linda, again, had a quasi-mystical sense that she was returning to a lost Eden. The isolation of the farm only sharpened Updike’s work ethic: there was nothing else to do but read ...”

“... of ‘the eternal’, art may sign away its epic prestige, surrendering its totalising power to what Lukács would later lament as the ‘kaleidoscopic chaos’ of modern narrative impressionism. Ford’s Hardy combines in this way – if complicatedly – the eternal and the modern. The ‘half a Londoner’ he brings into relief is the young man ...”

“... their two small children and new baby. At Happisburgh, where the other invited guests included Henry Moore and Ivon Hitchens, Hepworth and Nicholson swam in the sea, played cricket and discussed ideas for their work. Nicholson photographed Hepworth’s naked back and Hepworth, after collecting driftwood and stones on the beach, described Nicholson’s head ...”

“... a grocer stocking Caribbean goods that he should offer credit, as is customary in the Caribbean.Henry Oliver, the man Moses is expecting, eventually arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a pair of watchekongs to greet the ‘beast winter’. A white woman from Ladbroke Grove ...”

“... composer of whom his family had ever been talking lends the first page of his memoir a dramatic power of surprise. Strolling in Vienna on an August afternoon in 1825, the 12-year-old boy and his father notice a man walking alone, heading straight towards us ... He was powerful looking, of medium height, vigorous in his gait and in his lively movements, his ...”