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“... and The Topeka School, Lerner the writer – born in Topeka, school debating champion, graduate of Brown, Fulbright fellow in Madrid, now poet and novelist, resident in Brooklyn and married with two girls – has received a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant; when early copies of The Topeka School arrived in London and New York, I heard ...”

“... provided the movement with one of its boldest acts when she had herself arrested disguised as ‘Jane Warton’, a working-class woman, to expose the government’s double standards. Earlier accounts of Constance’s life have claimed that she was interested in prison reform long before she became a suffragette, but Jenkins has found little evidence of ...”

“... title suggests, they are prone to destructive acts. The protagonist of the opening story, ‘The Brown Coast’, is typical in that he has inflicted violence on his own life: after losing his job through incompetence, his inheritance due to rear-ending an attorney, and his wife by having an affair, Bob is in exile, doing odd jobs at his uncle’s beach ...”

“... of stained glass above the front door lets in some light, but it’s quickly absorbed by the brown-painted wood on the walls. Step into the drawing room, however, and you’re suddenly, implausibly surrounded by decoration and colour. Pale green stalks, leaves, tulip buds and flowers are intertwined on the walls and there’s a narrow frieze just below ...”

“... rewarding than Fielding (largely on moral grounds), Maria Edgeworth to write more enjoyably than Jane Austen, Villette to be superior to Jane Eyre, and a certain Mrs Jenkin to be a finer writer by far, in the realistic mode, than George Eliot. (Mrs Jenkin was a close friend of the Ruffinis.) At 15, Vernon Lee was already ...”

“... magazine and rosary beads close at hand, visited by everyone except her wayward husband; and Jane Lohan, who has no visitors at all, though she comes from a large family. The patients on the Ward have no privacy, for ‘the engineering of the human body is not, sadly, inclined to modesty during illness’. Sinéad might be running from her own body, but ...”

“... suit He’s a cruising bruiser with a shooter and a cute little Twin blade Sin trade In a Blue brown New Town. It’s the same hand on the windpipe! It’s the same sand in the windsock! It’s the same brand on the handbag! It’s the same gland in the handjob! The room is black. The knuckles crack. The blind masseuse walks up your back. The saxophone is ...”

“... Virginia Woolf’s. 1924 was the year of Woolf’s ground-breaking essay on ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, which urges the development of new narrative techniques and criticises Arnold Bennett and other Edwardian novelists for doing exactly what Hall does throughout The Unlit Lamp: deduce identity from a description of environment and appearance. Literary ...”

“... as when Florence, seen from San Miniato, is said to look like ‘a great basket of white & brown eggs’. Already, then, in spite of bereavements, breakdowns, and, if you compare it with what was available to contemporary men of her class, a relative constriction of life, she had educated herself as a writer; prepared to become a great one: which is ...”

“... sister and sister, brother and sister, husband and wife – would make better illustrations to Jane Austen (providing you blot out the occasional scrap of Roman scenery) than the English fashion-plates publishers tend nowadays to turn up. The young people in them look, on the whole, to be lively and agreeable, if sometimes also a bit wet or pompous. And he ...”

“... boat, the Ardent Spirit. When James gently but none the less patronisingly dismissed Jane Austen as ‘knowing no more of her process than the brown bird that sings on the orchard bough’, he forgot or ignored the fact that a highly skilled and instinctive artist may know very little about how his task came to ...”

“... battledress he had cadged off some ex-army student, did so very consciously. But Amis wore his brown tweed jacket and cherry-red polo sweater without giving the impression of having taken any thought about them. He was seeking contributions for Oxford Poetry. As editor he printed long pieces of his own, strangely dithyrambic, almost Swinburnian, and about ...”

“... make up their minds about them: Emma Bovary’s eyes are black in one chapter, in other chapters brown or blue. Lionel Shriver rarely lingers over physical descriptions, with one great exception: she’s highly conscious of how much her characters weigh. Her most famous novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin, is arranged as a series of letters written by the ...”

“... personage have presumably made substantial sums with their pedestrian efforts to complete two of Jane Austen’s unfinished novels, Sanditon and The Watsons. Georgette Heyer, imitating no one in particular, for years kept a faithful following with a series of indistinguishable novels in which very similar characters postured against the romantic backdrop of ...”

“... One of the most striking things is the way in which religious imagery – ‘the bitter face of a brown icon/And the solid murmur of a thousand swords’ – enters the poems without seeming to be summoned or made use of, and almost against the conscious will of the poet. It is as if in this predicament, and with a poet’s talent, she cannot help but see ...”