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“... commemorating the tourist attraction which it was also to become. The third narrative tells how George Meredith modelled for the corpse in the painting and how his wife then ran away with the painter (see also the sonnets in Modern Love). The three tales are deftly assembled and get on very well together. Chatterton is represented in the novel as an ...”

“... When Meredith Potter, the producer, asks Stella, the heroine of An Awfully Big Adventure, what she thinks J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner is about, she says: ‘Love. People loving people who love somebody else.’ He explains that she is mistaken, and that it is mostly about time. An Awfully Big Adventure is about people – members of the Liverpool Repertory Company in 1950 – loving people who love somebody else, as well as about Liverpool, about 1950, and about theatricals ...”

“... It was fortunate for George Eliot, or Marian Evans as she was in 1852, that the philosopher Herbert Spencer rejected her brave and desperate pleas for him to marry her. If he had accepted, she might well have found herself in something akin to Sarah Austin’s position as emotional and financial prop to a miserable, selfish hypochondriac ...”

“... on one side, Unitarian on the other. All three Trevelyan brothers were unbelievers, but with George it was much more than mere absence of belief, it was a creed in its own right. ‘Two terrible things have happened this week,’ he was heard to say, ‘my son has bought a motorbike and my daughter has become a Christian.’ As a young don, he was turned ...”

“... new circumstances. He is free to dream, the dreams surreal and disturbing. In Modern Love (1862), George Meredith captured the end of a marriage from the perspective of a number of characters in a sequence of 16-line poems. Poem XXV begins:You like not that French novel? Tell me why.You think it quite unnatural. Let us see.The actors are, it seems, the ...”

“... over the place, though the only examples he gives with any particularity come from middle to late George Eliot. In ‘the classic realist text’ Mr MacCabe distinguishes two types of discourse or language, having first remarked in a footnote: ‘Throughout this work language (and its compounds) will be used as a synonym for discourse, that is to say as a ...”

“... The celebrated Victorian solicitor George Lewis began his career of more than half a century in the law shop of his father, whose waiting-room was constantly crowded with supplicants for his services. As John Juxon suggests, the elder Lewis could have served as a model for the abrasive Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations, who suspended his moral judgment when dealing with his greasy, grimy riffraff of clients – cracksmen, fences, thieves – and then, in revulsion, went to a washbasin and scrubbed his hands with water and scented soap and even, in extreme cases, gargled ...”

“... Two characters in pursuit of their author: such are George Neville and Witter Bynner, two chunks of raw material, anxious to tell the world about their cook. George Neville went to school with D.H. Lawrence and supposed himself the ‘original’ of George Saxton in The White Peacock: in his memoir he congratulates himself upon his useful contribution to Lawrence’s conception of true manliness ...”

“... exceptionally gilt and splendid dining room’, remarks: ‘I can stand a great deal of gold.’ Meredith, who ‘talked with a kind of swagger’, said of Gladstone that he was ‘a man of marvellous aptitudes but no greatness of mind’; and of Swinburne that he was ‘a sea blown to a storm by a sigh’. When Dickens laughed, ‘the surprise of it was ...”

“... the site of one of the defining moments of the civil rights struggle, when the black student James Meredith insisted, against violent opposition, on enrolling in the then all-white college in 1962. It’s generally agreed that Obama won the first third of the debate (about the economic crisis), while McCain won the second two-thirds, on foreign policy. In his ...”

“... nouvelle. When the manuscript was accepted in 1941 she had wanted to call it Images of Mica, but George Barker, whom it was all about, flipped the typed pages at random and found a sentence beginning: ‘By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept ... ’ Images of Mica would have remained on the shelf for ever, but the trouvaille title was just it: nor ...”

“... publishers have found it pays to have five separate editions of Barchester Towers in print, but no Meredith or Lytton, so it pays to commission the same big familiar lives time and again. Because of the duplication biographers are keener than ever to find fresh angles. Few have new evidence, everyone has a new line. What emerges is less a contest as to which ...”

“... because I must lunch with Clive tomorrow in my new coat’. Before Bell it was her half-brother George Duckworth. Given an inadequate dress allowance by her father, Leslie Stephen, who spent the years after the death of his wife demanding sympathy and worrying about financial ruin, she’d had a dress made from green furnishing fabric. Duckworth ‘looked ...”

“... with a group of US fiction writers around his age that includes the late David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides. There are a few things that set Antrim apart: he’s Southern; his strongest affinity to a writer in the previous generation is to Donald Barthelme, not Don DeLillo; he’s the least likely to be ...”

“... or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought’. George Bornstein, in a recent book of essays on ‘post-romantic poetic development’ which has clear affinities with both Woolford’s and Tucker’s projects, devotes one essay to the arrangement of Dramatic Lyrics as a collection which ‘displays ...”