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“... in the act of producing spirits in the form of ectoplasmic structures, or ‘pseudo-pods’. These long viscous skeins of white stuff, which sometimes passed as if miraculously through a gauzy gag tied over Eva C.’s face, were thought to be ‘ideoplasts’ – projections of the medium’s mind. The photographer and impresario of these séances was Mme ...”

“... was believed to sour a nursing woman’s milk and endanger the baby’s health. Nursing was a long-term affair, of two years or more, and it was patently unreasonable to demand husbandly abstention for so long a time, although the hiatus may have acted as a form of birth control and saved some women’s lives by ...”

“... seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was ‘the official guide’ to the vocabulary of Finnegans Wake. Why wouldn’t he be? He was the inventor of the portmanteau word (‘You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are ...”

“... To call him ‘C.P.’, as some did even then, no doubt implied a special relationship. It was Pamela Hansford Johnson who put her foot down, when they were married in 1950, and who decided that he was to be called Charles; in relation to any earlier period the name is an innocent anachronism, which has the advantage of facilitating quotation from ...”

“... of privileged young dissidents: they came – or were forced – back into the fold, at least for long enough to launch their careers. H.W. Stubbs of Charterhouse went on to teach classics at the University of Exeter. Philip Toynbee was expelled from Rugby, but then handed over to the monks of Ampleforth to be crammed, successfully, for a history scholarship ...”

“... There must have been something about Bradshaigh that drew him in and kept him writing, long after her query about Clarissa had been dealt with.It might have been her cheekiness. She had little time for the niceties of letter writing and addressed him from the start as if they had known each other for years. Finding Richardson implacable on the ...”

“... attached a mock-commentary by Scriblerus Secundus, modelled mainly on Pope’s Dunciad, not very long after his mock-Dunciadic attack on Pope and Swift themselves. The remarkable thing, however, was not so much that Fielding appropriated specific routines from the Scriblerian masters as that he later extended his deep assimilation of their stylistic manner ...”

“... point is not that Fielding would have been incapable of recording sentiments like Pamela’s, but that he would normally have felt compelled to present them as repellent.’ Here the point is indeed clear, and it issues in a local discrimination which a reader of Pamela and Joseph Andrews can test. But some ...”

“... and it is unclear whether the letter will ever be sent. The errant letter is an old plot device. Pamela complains about the important letter to her mother that is stolen; Tom Jones has to leave home because the letter that contains the secret of his birth is misdirected; Tess writes a letter of confession to Angel Clare, but it slips beneath the carpet and ...”

“... and debasement – ‘How to Bathe Your New Baby’ v. ‘Win the Chance to Pole-Dance with Pamela!’ – it may be time to consider whether these men’s magazines aren’t just the latest enlargement on the old fantasy of men having everything they want to have and finding a way to call it their destiny. Stag & Groom Magazine is edited by a woman who ...”

“... prosody was born. George Plimpton has tripped on a handy way of telling the story of a life, so long as that life happens to be one like Truman Capote’s. In place of an account shaped by Plimpton’s sentences, what we have is a birth-to-death narrative made up of the voices of those who knew the subject. It is a fine and busy book, a small marvel of ...”

“... be made to seem startlingly contemporary in their priorities and perceptions, but the Souls have long been the prisoners of a pre-modern past, a world of transparent ease. The record of their conversation and activities conjures the atmosphere of the Naughty Nineties and the sunlit years of the Edwardian era: it is all dancing till dawn, pomade and ...”

“... Fielding, who might be expected to be personally hostile, probably didn’t know who the author of Pamela was when he wrote Shamela, but did know when he praised Clarissa. When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said ‘I heartily despise [Richardson] and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his works in a most scandalous manner,’ she was responding simultaneously to the ...”

“... engraved gold cufflinks, or, as Mrs Harris did, writing droll verses congratulating him on the long list of his conquests. They would be forced into these strategems because their telephone calls to Dr Tarnower, which were numerous and very frequent, were not always well received. Thus the women would be reduced to telephoning his friends or questioning ...”

“... literally, with members of the Russian Parliament. The country is falling apart, and the narrator, long into his career, feels ‘deeply grey of soul’. He is grumpy with his decade ‘with its lazy decadence, ideological vacancy, consumerist ethics, empty narcissisms’. He is getting old. It is evident that his autumn journey is to be considered parallel to ...”