“... a shifting sense of communal responsibilities and values. So she reads together Dr Johnson and Boswell; Fanny Burney and minor female writers of Gothic fiction; the dread Hannah More together with a marvellous collection of lesser-known women (Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Delany) whose letters and diaries survived against the ...”

“... early life, so that we see, not only Grieve the friend of Red Clydesiders John MacLean and James Maxton, but also the Grieve whose Scottish nationalism was encouraged by his rejection by English girls. Heady on his home-brew of Nietzsche, John Davidson, and almost any other literary material he could devour, this proto-MacDiarmid emerges as something ...”

“... between modern understandings of sexuality and the ‘same-sexuals’ he discusses. As John Boswell observed when reflecting on the reception of his own work in the 1980s, advocates of either pure essentialism or pure constructionism mostly exist as straw men. Our own desire can strike us as alien and predictable by turn, make us seem fools or ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who lived ...”

“... line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her preface, and one might almost suppose that the spur for writing this book came to her from the arrival of a hoard of Boaden volumes from a relative’s ...”

“... historians: some of them treat him as respectfully as if he were Thucydides. Dr Johnson told Boswell to read ‘any’ of Baxter’s books, since ‘they are all good’; the doctor also admitted to Reynolds that in his own conversation he often used a ploy that Baxter used in his sermons, always to say one thing that was above the capacity of his ...”

“... of the Celtic lands is seen as the preparatory school or training-ground of empire-building. James VI and I patronised a scheme for a ‘plantation’ or colony in the Hebrides, as well as the one in Ulster. An English-speaking élite in these areas acquired attitudes of racial superiority which were extended to Africans and Indians. Men like Raleigh and ...”

“... restlessness of the depressive temperament which Dr Johnson once summed up in an ashamed letter to Boswell: ‘I was glad to go abroad, and, perhaps, glad to come home; which is, in other words, I was, I am afraid, weary of being at home, and weary of being abroad. Is not this the state of life?’Certainly Auden wrote in a comparable letter in 1939, ‘I ...”

“... sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in ...”

“... stylised composure; and Whitman’s composure finds its equal among American writers only in Henry James. With majestic aloofness, he likes, as he says early in Song of Myself, to be ‘both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it’. And like the games James plays in The Turn of the Screw, Whitman’s are ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... the masterful servility, the diffident arrogance – of a chronicler like Craft (or Boswell). His insecurity as a ‘provincial’ American, socially unvarnished and basically monolingual (whatever his other talents), set permanently in the midst of the polyglot, European and often aristocratic Stravinsky circle, was marvellously translated into ...”

“... adored the poem, and read it to an admiring audience at the London Coffee House which included Boswell, on whose account of the struggle Barbauld had based her work. Priestley was no less pleased with another of the poems, ‘An Address to the Deity’, an exemplification of one of his favourite notions, that the good man lived constantly mindful of the ...”

“... Kauffman were friends, while the younger Cosway began her career, as her critical friend James Northcote wrote, ‘filled with the highest expectations of being … another Angelica Kauffman’. Le Brun and Cosway coincided several times in Paris, where Cosway cut a lesser figure. She was scathing in her diary about her French rival, who probably had ...”

“... on the various ways in which Cather – in Acocella’s view the only American novelist besides James to rival Tolstoy and Flaubert for beauty of style and moral depth – had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics. The story Acocella told was one of noble articulation – Cather’s poised, pared-down imaginative utterance – overwhelmed by ...”