“... Arthur Marshall girl, the Prince of Wales at Fort Belvedere, ‘I’ve worked with Whicker,’ ‘brown sauce straight from old Harold at Number Ten’. T.S. Eliot is said to be well-disposed to the Vardon Hall scheme in Hemlock and After. Another pointer to a certain awkwardness of stance in relation to the tradition is to be found in the excess of literary ...”

“... in which women were described and rated like horses: ‘Perfectly sound in wind and limb. A fine Brown girl rising nineteen . . . Fit for High Keeping with a Jew Merchant.’ When Wellington left Wilson to go off to the Peninsular War, his campaign orders included the instruction that ‘there shall be six women to every hundred men and these shall be drawn ...”

“... on their food. Parr is behind the counter where the pump-action bottles of mustard, ketchup and brown sauce stand surrounded by crumbs. Nobody is looking at the camera.The Last Resort was shown in Liverpool, where the images came as ‘no particular shock’ to local people. When it went to the Serpentine, it was a different story: ‘All hell broke ...”

“... In her unfinished novel Sanditon written in 1817, twenty years after the poet’s death, Jane Austen conveys such suspicions very sharply. Her heroine converses in Chapter Seven with Sir Edward, a foolish man of feeling for whom Burns was ‘propelled’, in art and life, by ‘the sovereign impulses of illimitable ardour’. Charlotte won’t have ...”

“... strongman squatting on my bed. He sees me too; from beneath his shaggy brow he rolls a liquid eye. Brown-skinned, naked except for the tattered hide of some endangered species, he is bouncing on his heels and smoking furiously without taking the cigarette from his lips: puff, bounce, puff, bounce. What rubbish, I think, actually shouting at myself, but ...”

“... as the basis of urban planning in Europe; on the other side were Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who embraced the commercial strip (‘billboards are almost all right,’ they proclaimed in 1972 in Learning from Las Vegas, a manifesto to which Delirious New York is an indirect riposte). Koolhaas could reject the reactionary ...”

“... he said, “I want a new one.” The one he wanted cost £900. We bought it.’Nicholas Paget-Brown​ , who was then the leader of the council, lives alone not far from the Fulham Road. His gentle manners precede him, in the style of a decently prepped, slightly fogeyish man of the 1950s, and he acts as if he might find the modern world fascinating were ...”

“... had borrowed the dupe’s car who was walking carless in the mountains near Salen. Her companion Jane? Oh she was in the shop buying ice-cream. Ahah. And Mr Stone’s ferry for I was fast approaching, one that shuttled to and fro all day, until early evening when the bay here was deserted. Had she tailed him in order to make one last bootless act of ...”

“... has long been a classic theme. Charlotte Brontë’s excoriating portrait of Mrs Reed in Jane Eyre is undoubtedly an attack on some detested female oppressor of her youth: Brontë’s description fairly seethes with murderous venom. Edith Wharton heroines, steely girls on the make such as Lily Bart or Undine Spragg, routinely anathematise the ...”

“... Reader, like the cladding on a nuclear reactor, are essays about 19th-century women novelists: Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. The tribute paid to Austen, in particular, is remarkable both for its warmth and for its acuity. Woolf admired Austen above all for her ability to grasp the exceptional moment – ‘in which all the happiness of ...”

“... first image is that of a door standing ajar (it is night) … A woman enters, wearing a long brown fitted coat, her face hidden by the hood. She carries two cardboard boxes stacked one on top of the other. Grocery items protrude at the top. She pushes the door closed with her shoulder. Disappears from the frame, reappears without the boxes and removes ...”

“... and ill’, and keeps his hands (seemingly for the duration of the entire novel) in his brown velvet smoking jacket. A neighbour, Lord Warburton, is more robust than these two New England aristocrats. He stands with his hands behind him, and in one of his fists – ‘a large, white, well-shaped fist’ – he has crumpled a pair of dirty dog-skin ...”

“... In Brontë’s work the boundaries of the term are explored; the ‘hypochondria’ from which Jane Eyre suffers on the eve of her wedding is a crawling (and well-founded) apprehension that disaster is around the corner. Our bodies make us know things our mind doesn’t quite know, or won’t accept: ambiguities in our situation, undeclared and forbidden ...”

“... voices’.Ironically, Anne Stevenson, we soon learn, had similar expectations: ‘I had read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Henry James, and I expected England to be the book I always wanted to live in.’ But, Malcolm writes dryly, for Stevenson ‘England turned out to be another book altogether.’ Soon after the publication of Bitter ...”

“... enjoyed refighting the Reformation. Plays, paintings (famously Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Grey), new editions of John Lingard’s revisionist History of England, as well as Pugin’s architectural manifesto Contrasts, all treated it as the determining event in national history. The facts were fiercely argued and at a popular level there was much ...”