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“... True originality,’ Cocteau, Pessoa’s contemporary, wrote, ‘consists in trying to behave like everybody else without succeeding.’ It was once characteristically modern to idealise originality, and to conceive of it as a form of failure. The fittest as those who didn’t fit. If there is nothing more compliant now than the wish to be original – to find one’s own voice etc – it is also assumed that originality and success can, and should, go together ...”

“... Quarterly saw what was going on, and Gifford killed The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, after Taylor and Hessey had twice reprinted it, far more effectively than was the case with his attack on Keats. Keats himself was enchanted by Hazlitt’s reply in the ‘Letter to William Gifford Esq.’ and copied pages of it in his journal-letter to his brother and ...”

“... mean. When he was trying to find a title for his book, Carroll insisted to the playwright Tom Taylor that ‘in spite of your “morality”, I want something sensational.’ Twenty years later, he was adamant that the books ‘have no religious teaching whatever in them – in fact, they do not teach anything at all.’ The original version of Through ...”