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“... engage a rather directionless European like Logan. They conversed. The Indian, whose name was George and who was a Christian, immediately desired to help Logan in his search for the Bengali primer. The Englishman did not particularly desire any company, but on the other hand he hadn’t the heart to refuse such an unselfish offer. Yet – he was still ...”

“... in strange fantasies to sustain the impression of intimacy with Austen that the novels create. George Saintsbury, who coined the term ‘Janeite’ in 1894, made a point of his readiness ‘to live with and to marry’ Elizabeth Bennet and serve as ‘a knight (or at least a squire) of the order of St Jane’. In 1949, after writing two books about ...”

“... Sainte-Beuve was ugly and effected [sic] a persona of cynicism and boredom.’ Their mutual friend George Sand appears in both books as a spiteful, small-minded trouble-maker. In her novel Horace (1841), she caricatured Marie as a skinny seductress with bad teeth, bony hands, a good memory but no wit. Both Bolster and Stock-Morton accuse Balzac of similar ...”

“... mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There like a bird it sits, and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. Crewe argues that the ‘liberated’ masculine soul in the poem is in fact ‘an exotic figure of ...”

“... name of Errol Flynn (as star) above two of them, Sabatini was not only a ‘history-teller,’ as George MacDonald Fraser defines his art in a foreword to The Fortunes of Casanova, but one who delighted in a spot of swashbuckling. At the same time he was recognised as a serious historian who had published authoritative biographies of Torquemada and Cesare ...”

“... The pictures were not well arranged or dusted – when I took one down, the skeleton of a small bird fell out from behind it. ‘They do not belong to me,’ Lydia would say emphatically, and in most cases this was true. Keynes had bequeathed them to King’s College, Cambridge, stipulating that they should remain with Lydia during her lifetime. In ...”

“... of dealers and other intermediaries (he described Joseph Duveen as a ‘serpent charming a bird’). Velázquez’s Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, on Horseback was bought for him by his mother. Huntington imposed on himself a rule to buy only outside Spain – ‘to Spain I do not go as a plunderer,’ he declared – although as an amateur ...”

“... get the papers this morning, but when I draw nearer it takes off and flaps up the beck. Not a rare bird, the heron’s size is never less than spectacular, and grey and white though they are they still seem exotic. Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry ...”

“... all he was content to show, for more than thirty years of story-writing. One thinks, he said, of George Sand turning out volume after volume while never once neglecting a love affair, never missing one puff of her hookah. Well, no matter, O’Faolain has done many other things and written many other books besides his collections of stories. He has been, he ...”

“... and down-beat, sometimes brutal and sometimes (perhaps just once) tender. Ruby’s parents are George and Berenice, who own a pet shop. They are not working-class people; they belong to the shop-keeping classes, which are different. By the date of the Queen’s coronation – Ruby is one of the first babies of the new Elizabethan Age – they own a ...”

“... she celebrated Trollope at a time when nobody read him. Against the current of opinion she admired George Saintsbury, and when she became editor of the Dial commissioned work from this writer, already over eighty and hardly to be thought of as belonging to any avant-garde. Indeed her notion of what was worth having, whether avant-garde or not, was based on ...”

“... of good and evil, one which stands in for historical and political investigation. He thus shares George W. Bush’s view of ethics, the only difference between the Marxist and the neo-conservative on this score being that Bush approves of such simple-minded oppositions whereas Jameson does not. Again and again in his work, he has set up this tattered straw ...”

“... travesties of justice – notably the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, George Zimmerman, which gave birth to the #BlackLivesMatter movement – alongside many more ambiguous affronts (such as the lack of nominees of colour at the 2015 Academy Awards, which gave birth to the #OscarsSoWhite campaign), the rapturous, impossibly ...”

“... Henry Adams is a rare bird in American letters: rich, autonomous, and socially unassailable; descendant of Presidents, secure within the genteel Establishment, yet holding himself aloof from it; historian of his country, toward which he felt a proprietary concern; and, by his own reckoning, ‘a failure in politics and literature, in society and in solitude, in hatred and in love ...”

“... said to that?’ We know the answer: ‘Not the same thing a bit!’ Another minister of religion, George MacDonald, obliquely got to grips in his fiction with certain doctrinal problems which agitated him, and ended by supplying for his readers a good dose of ‘spiritual nourishment’, even if he couldn’t tell the difference between his grandmother and ...”