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“... illustrated the providential rewards of right thinking and right doing). Jill Miller’s Happy as a Dead Cat is firmly in the line of such works as The Washerwoman of Finchey Common. Although it masquerades as a novel, mean-minded calculation reveals that it has a mere 24,000 words (some of the longer pieces in Firebird can ...”

“... of the unacceptable faeces of theatrical capitalism’. There is some repetition: the comedian Max Miller is once again ‘a god ... a saloon-bar Priapus’, and various people are ‘a sphinx’, or, in the case of his second wife Mary Ure, ‘not a sphinx’. The spite, though, comes up new and fresh. When Look back in anger opened at the Royal Court, the ...”

“... One of these books is very long and the other is very short. Each in its own way is a wonderful piece of work. They stand at opposite ends of the century that runs from the 1740s to the 1840s, but they may be thought to bear each other out, in ways which affect an understanding of the family life of that time, and of its incorporation in the literature of Romanticism – that part of it, in particular, which is premised on conceptions of the divided or multiple self and can be referred to as the literature of romantic duality ...”

“... rights (see especially Howard, ‘He lived in a man’s world, but not in his mind or heart,’ or Jill Mann’s inaugural lecture in Cambridge two years ago: ‘he alone ... has an idea of what a real apology to a woman would look like’). Is it possible, given current awareness of the way in which observers affect what they observe, to get any ...”

“... up home together in a London flat below that of Porter’s former partner, the Australian novelist Jill Neville. After a fight which seems to have involved Porter throwing Neville into the Thames, the couple had split up. In her 1966 novel Fall-Girl, Neville depicted Porter as Seth, a knuckle-cracking, gawky Australian detester of ‘the English Class ...”

“... having assured Elena that anyone who finds her novel risqué is an idiot who hasn’t read Henry Miller, gets drunk and assaults her in a lift. Meanwhile, Elena’s university friends are too caught up in workers’ rights to take her novel seriously. As one classmate puts it, ‘You did everything possible, right? But this, objectively, is not the moment ...”