“... dislike (not envy) of Graham Greene, on these grounds, emerges in a couplet from Byrne: And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen, In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. Greene achieved a bogus newness, in Burgess’s view, by laboriously making grace and sin the novelties of a kind of fiction which was no more than the old sentimental sensationalism ...”

“... converting a house for their retirement. The Greens are so entirely married they even look alike: white-haired, spry, with candid blue eyes. They will prove Monti’s pattern only partial, for in their case it’s the dream house that’s going to crumble, not the dream itself, which is the fabric of their relationship. They’re wrestling ineptly with ...”

“... until the Forties. They were aided by films (and in the Forties and Fifties a TV series) starring William Boyd – a star who in the geriatric last stages of his career had barely a hop left in him. At the crucial stage of Zane Grey’s career, 1905-8, Lina took charge as her husband’s literary agent, editor and financial patron. Using his wife’s ...”

“... sexy nurses and then put out to dry in the sun, pinned up in shawls. Mr Scobie reads the Bible and William Blake, and then he makes up little riddles. One of them is about dying – but nobody wants to hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine ...”

“... the New York Public Library, persuaded Bishop to take up poetry rather than medicine after Vassar; William Carlos Williams reported after a reading: ‘Marianne Moore had a little girl named Elizabeth Bishop in tow. It seems she writes poetry.’ Moore is hymned here in one of Bishop’s less successful poems. ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’ celebrates ...”

“... Mort’ – Doxy, oh! thy glaziers shine   As glimmars by the Salomon! – and that, by William Walsh’s namby-pamby pseudo-pastoral, ‘The Despairing Lover’: Distracted with care For Phillis the fair, Since nothing could move her, Poor Damon the lover ... The three together liven each other up splendidly, and give a real sense of the ...”

“... of a pastiche of the Arts versus Science debate of the Sixties. Fogel is the champion of the ‘white woolly warmth of the quantitative revolution’, in which traditional ‘literary’ history will be displaced by a new ‘scientific’ history based on statistics and computing. Elton dissents, arguing against high-level generalisation and reasserting the ...”

“... much more touchingly, Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with ...”

“... picture of a Spain bristling with violence on the verge of becoming a world power. The historian William Atkinson could be called prescient for writing, early this century, that the accession of a woman is ‘an event commonly fraught with untoward consequences’. He was, however, talking about the ‘salvation’ of Castile in the 1470s, not Britain in ...”

“... legitimacy of slave property but obligated the federal government to protect it. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison agreed with Calhoun. On 4 July 1854, in one of the most flamboyant acts of defiance in American history, he burned the Constitution, calling it ‘a covenant with death, an agreement with hell’. Three years later, in the case of Dred ...”

“... The suicides of Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay, the deaths of Mary’s children Clare in 1818 and William in 1819, coming so close together must have had for her the weight of a curse. This story of 1820 seems to say that in a family where only forbidden affections can thrive it is better that all life cease. Read alongside Frankenstein, it also confirms Jay ...”

“... in discussing the impact of the early settlers on the North American environment, he cites not William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983), now the standard work on the subject, but Civilisation and Climate by Ellsworthy Huntington, published in 1925. His account of the Reconstruction era after the Civil War rehashes long-discredited myths: that Congress ...”

“... to be ordered into a book. Ritvo makes much of writers like Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Bewick and William Frederick Martyn to advance her claim that there was resistance to the ‘hegemonic juggernaut’ of Linnaean classification. But in telling this tale of brave outsider plurality v. the chilly autocracy of establishment systematists, and in being so eager ...”

“... and roundness of flesh with red chalk; and finally half-cancelling and illuminating the forms with white. Even when he drew from a model he made it respond to other figures so that in his finest compositions each component works in rhythm with all the others. Studies by him of life – the world outside the studio – are unknown. There are, it is true, very ...”

“... and inventors. Nonetheless, it was a Scottish (or at least Anglo-Scottish) educationalist, Sir William Spens, who in his 1938 report on the future of secondary education proposed that children should be given a place at grammar school if ‘family circumstance and tradition’ meant they were likely to work ‘with tongue and pen’ – in other words, not ...”