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“... were much needed. By 1782, the masters of the mid-century were all dead: Fielding in 1754, Richardson in 1761, Sterne in 1768 and Smollett in 1771. Among his contemporaries, only Frances Burney was at the height of her powers. Neither Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances would soon enjoy immense popularity, nor the younger radical novelists such as ...”

“... any thing before nor would not now.Thomas Lomax felt his misfortune ‘a daily source of grief’; John Stafford’s family were shoeless, workless, creditless and hopeless, ‘reduced to the lowest extremity’, by the time he put pen to paper in ‘painful anxiety’. Men resolved that if helped they would find work, women assured ‘the gentlemen’ they ...”

“... for Foreign Affairs in the Thirties and Stalin’s Ambassador to Washington after the war. John Carswell is the son of Catherine Carswell, who was Ivy’s best friend until she followed her husband to Russia in 1920. In 1959, after Catherine and Litvinov were dead, Ivy got permission to visit her native land and turned up on ...”

“... and (Wells again) The History of Mr Polly; perhaps the Antipodean outsider Henry Handel Richardson would have scooped it with The Getting of Wisdom. In 1924 Forster’s publishers might have thought they had a chance with his block-buster, A Passage to India. For once, Wells wasn’t dogging him: but there was Maurice Baring’s C, Ford’s Some do ...”

“... Peckham to Bermondsey in order to give it a more authentically working-class flavour (shades of John Major?). A generation earlier, H.G. Wells grew up in a basement kitchen with a mother as discontented as Steedman’s and Woodward’s, a mother who abandoned the domestic hearth, and forced her younger son out into the world as a draper’s apprentice the ...”

“... the two memoirs. Were Picasso able, from beyond the grave, to ban it, he would do so. The idea was John Richardson’s. He provides a contextual epilogue, taken more or less verbatim from the second volume of his mammoth Life of Picasso. Marilyn McCully (who is working on the third volume with Richardson) provides a ...”

“... the early work of Browning and Tennyson within the ‘two systems of concentric circles’, as John Stuart Mill described them, that radiated out from the radical Bentham and the conservative Coleridge. While Browning wrote for the Monthly Repository, edited by the Benthamite W.J. Fox, the young Tennyson associated with Arthur Hallam and the conservative ...”

“... Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people grander than himself that his life story can’t be told without allusion to those of more complicated and ambitious figures like Pope, Swift and Addison ...”

“... or ignoring the result if it came out against strike action. Nottingham stuck, however. In Henry Richardson it had a left-wing general secretary and, in Ray Chadburn, an ineffectual, moderate president. To the Left, it had a notoriously moderate tradition reaching back to the miners’ strike of 1926 when the ‘Spencer’ union broke away from the Mining ...”

“... feel there is no nobility to our rain, no dignity, no beauty, none of the honour of extremity. In John Mortimer’s novel Paradise Postponed, a woman living in the country calls the doctor in a state of agitation. He arrives and asks what’s wrong. ‘That,’ she said, pointing out of the window. ‘It’s so quiet and green and it’s always ...”

“... interpreting Fielding as too like his own Squire Western, Scott as a mere Border balladeer. Richardson and Dickens, though allowed some merit, were kept out of the limelight. Even within the oeuvres of the favoured George Eliot, James and Conrad, Leavis went in for a further process of separating wheat from chaff, so that it was not shelves of ...”

“... as Dostoevsky would do, just as he had refused to play the conventional game as he had found it in Richardson and Constant. No heroine of his could die like Clarissa, and Debreczeny points out that he wrote ‘Rubbish’ in his copy of Adolphe at the point where the hero throws himself on the ground and wishes to be swallowed up. Ellénore’s death when ...”

“... period, Burney’s paragon-by-numbers has just the properties to be found in any amount of post-Richardson fiction. All that beaming and glistening. She is put in interesting situations: an heiress, she has to survive the circling fortune-hunters. Yet she herself is not interesting. The life of the novel is all in its minor characters, several of whom are ...”

“... density of satirical allusion. He also admitted to missing the play of intertextuality in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, a satire shot through with innuendo and obfuscation: ‘I did not understand that the Scene of Locket and Peachum’s quarrels was an imitation of one between Brutus and Cassius till I was told it.’ Nothing approached the ...”

“... Britain’s youth, and a tragic precursor for the other three young officers she loved – Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow and her younger brother, Edward, all killed in action. When one reads Brittain’s diary, it is hard not to resent the way Leighton cut across the natural line of her development. In the early entries, despite some priggishness and ...”