“... in my hands inside the cool, darkened hospital room’) and a shop assistant quoting Charlotte Brontë (though omitting the question marks). ‘She straightened her back, raised her finger and said: “Do you think I am an automaton, a machine without feelings, do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and ...”

“... New Writing. People with university degrees didn’t overawe her, and in 1952 she wrote that Emily Brontë had been lucky not to have her ‘natural discrimination’ spoiled by a formal literary education. In a piece on Burns that’s otherwise memorable only for its unscandalised take on the poet’s sinful ways (‘Burns adored women. Whenever he had ...”

“... so, like Cézanne, he read and read: George Eliot, Dickens (‘noble and healthy’), Charlotte Brontë, Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Daudet, Zola (‘healthy stuff and clears the mind’), Longfellow, Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe. He approves of Goncourt because he is ‘so conscientious, and so much toil goes into it’. He is ...”

“... BNP was picture-postcard Cliviger, in the Pennine foothills. For a while the party represented the Brontë village of Haworth on Bradford council.The language used by the BNP soon seeped into the mainstream. Like any far-right party, it thrived on the narrative of a sinister conspiracy led by international finance capital to destroy the nation-state. In ...”

“... yet readers thought he must be a cruder early model from the same pen. But, like Lermontov, Emily Brontë had taken the more subtle approach of presenting her hero through narrative intermediaries, two of whom are quite unimpressed by his heroic status. When Heathcliff has completed his fictional job he dies of literally having nothing more to do, a highly ...”

“... literature rather than painting. There is the Constable country – but set against that the Brontë country, Hardy’s Wessex and Dickens’s London. Bill Brandt, in a series of features printed in Lilliput, Picture Post and Harper’s Bazaar in the mid-Forties, set the words of British literary-landscape-makers against photographs of the houses in ...”

“... the facade. The cellar harbours a darker figure yet: the madwoman or sinister hag of Charlotte Brontë and Poe – or, according to the recent feminist work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, of women’s writing generally. Lurie incorporates this idea among her other symbolic and literary motifs, leaving them all in the sub-plot and, as it were, in ...”

“... point is, surely, that she never controlled or occupied her novels, in the sense that Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot were to do. Her greatest strength is to be herself at the side of her official theme, never wholly identified with it. Even in Mansfield Park, where she deliberately and very impressively takes on a large social and symbolic theme, there ...”

“... wrote Thackeray, ‘sublime in its simplicity, its energy, its honour, its affection’. Charlotte Brontë admired the same traits less officiously: ‘He not only loved his wife and children though he was a poet, but he loved them the better because he was a poet … I like Southey.’ The conclusion defies challenge; but one may wonder how much of the praise ...”

“... Dervla Murphy made her name as a writer who got on her bike and travelled bravely and alone through the less accessible parts of the non-European world. More recently, she stayed closer to her Irish home and investigated the religious and social divisions of Northern Ireland. In this book she turns her attention to the non-European populations of two British cities, Bradford and Birmingham, and there confronts the hazards and complexities of inner-city life with the same fortitude – sometimes amounting to pig-headedness – which carried her through Baltistan, Ethiopia and the further reaches of Nepal ...”

“... Like piano keys. These details are as literary in their realism as anything by Dickens or Emily Brontë. Playfully, MacLeod has even given us the key to his method. The art of fiction, which is the art of the illusionist, is memorably annotated in ‘Winter Dog’. A young boy has gone with his dog on a long sleigh ramble across the pack of drift ice ...”

“... the ‘vile French’ and clumsy piano-playing of the pupils, she came home. She was no Charlotte Brontë. London had already given her glimpses of an altogether brighter kind of life. She suggested acting but her father would not countenance it, and so after more quarrels she decided that rather than ‘teach the verbs “avoir” and “être” from ...”

“... poisonous form of nostalgia which can throw up all sorts of physical symptoms. So was Charlotte Brontë, in Brussels to perfect her language skills. Her novels, Dillon points out, are full of hypochondriacs: Lucy Snowe in Villette, for example, is subject to ‘an overheated and discursive imagination’. In Brontë’s ...”

“... before anything else, is A Woman’). There are also essays on Scott Fitzgerald, Twain, Emily Brontë, Stephen Crane, Traven’s The Death Ship, and of course Swift. It seems that no book concerned with the idea of the man of letters as man of action is nowadays complete without an essay or two on Swift: an honourable exemplar whose best older celebrants ...”

“... the Quiffquiff spoken of so highly by Lawrence of Arabia …’) My, we really are just like the Brontë sisters … So you’ve seen some movies have you, you rats. Out here they are following up The Catered Affair, which I drew my tiny line at, with Diabolique. The letter ends: Well, Sieve-lips and Paddle-tongue, I sure hope for all our sakes that this ...”