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“... and Wordsworth less ‘essentially poetic’ than Shelley and Blake, and deprecated what he called Jane Austen’s universe of undertones. During the Thirties he found in Auden ‘a definite backsliding in the technique of verse’, and regretted that he was ‘aping the antics of Kipling and Byron’. It is a mark of the division in Read that he was both ...”

“... in its self-awareness, but friendship should be almost insensible, taken for granted? C.S. Lewis, whose way with words can be almost as embarrassing as Forster’s, did not think so. He thought friendship, preferably between men, should be proclaimed as ‘the crown of life’, and he was impatient with its marginalisation as something that ‘fills up ...”

“... Fiction which do not seem to fit definition or common patterns at all: most familiarly, C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet Trilogy. This has space travel in two volumes out of three, once arranged scientifically, once angelically. It also has a very clear attack on Wells/Darwin (or at any rate on Wellsian Darwinists, as ...”

“... facility newly photographed in large-format full colour by David Moore. The Last Things (Dewi Lewis, £25) opens with an anonymous quote – ‘Ministry of Defence official, London 2007’ – that reads: ‘I don’t understand how you’ve got this far.’ What follows is a series of shots of unpeopled hallways and decontamination chambers, a pot-plant ...”

“... Elizabeth Jane Howard had been a novelist for forty years before she published The Light Years, the first volume of the Cazalet chronicles, in 1990. The fifth and final volume, All Change, was published in 2013, and she died in January this year, aged ninety. Her stepson Martin Amis advised her to embark on the Cazalet books, when she was hesitating between possibilities ...”

“... joyless document’, as the Hamburgers call it, was unpromising. No fictional would-be husband in Jane Austen, George Eliot or Meredith outdoes Austin in epistolary stiffness. Having set before Sarah his prospects – not good – in the legal profession, and the probability that they would have to wait several years before they could marry, he asked her to ...”

“... the mid-Victorian period. Robson discusses two especially notorious girl-idolators: Ruskin and Lewis Carroll. Ruskin said that the first virtue of girls ‘is to be intensely happy; – so happy that they don’t know what to do with themselves for happiness, – and dance instead of walking’. There is of course no reason why girls should be happier than ...”

“... Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature that could be contrived. Alice is the woman in white, or ...”

“... All the​ Supreme Court knew of ‘Jane Roe’ was that she lived in Dallas County, Texas under another name and that she ‘wished to terminate her pregnancy by an abortion performed by a competent, licensed physician, under safe, clinical conditions’. In a notarised statement filed with the court in May 1970, Roe affirmed that she was over 21 and unmarried ...”

“... States, Wheeler was on his way back to Nicaragua by way of Philadelphia when a female slave named Jane Johnson, along with two of her children, escaped with the aid of local abolitionists, notably one Passmore Williamson. A bitter court battle ensued, in which Wheeler failed to regain possession of his slaves but succeeded in having Williamson jailed. There ...”

“... They found Mary Jane Kelly lying on her bed, in the dingy room she rented in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street in Spitalfields. She was about 25 years old, a colleen from County Limerick, ‘possessed of considerable attractions’. Widowed young, she had turned, like thousands of others in late Victorian London, to prostitution ...”

“... difficulties start with her struggle to locate the material. Her ‘100 good women writers before Jane Austen’ are an arbitrary bunch, many obtained from a hacker’s job on Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800. Spender calls this a ‘Dictionary of Women Novelists’ – a significant blunder. Todd covers ...”

“... of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts should have contributed to a volume entitled ...”

“... working as a janitor in a small town under the Forth bridges, I went to see An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s film about her fellow New Zealander, the writer Janet Frame. In the film we see Frame, played by Kerry Fox, recently released from a long spell in a mental hospital, given shelter and support by a white-goateed older writer called Frank ...”

“... for his activities as a publisher of deluxe editions: a portfolio of Fifteen Drawings by Wyndham Lewis (1919), Ara Vos Prec by Eliot (1920), and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and Cantos 17-27 by Pound (1927). The son of immigrant Jews in the East End, he was a conscientious objector when he met Butts, who was working for an anti-conscription ...”