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“... In​ 1496 Pietro Bembo, a young Venetian scholar, published a short book on a long walk he had taken with a friend. Their hike led them from Messina, where the two of them had been studying Greek with Constantine Lascaris, to the top of Mount Etna. No one had seen a book like De Aetna. Mountains, though some curious thinkers had climbed them, were usually seen as fearsome and inhuman ...”

“... we now call ‘the Novel’ (though Richardson never attached this label to his book) respectable. Pamela caused an unprecedented stir, exciting something like a national argument about the purposes and value of fiction. It was the model for a new literature, whose influence we still feel. For a long time it has been the ...”

“... of these men, in their different ways, acknowledged a fundamental truth about Rome: the long neglected centre of the Church was transforming itself into the grandest of cities. In the early 15th century, when the papacy returned from its Babylonian captivity in Avignon, Rome was a shadow of its ancient imperial self. Perhaps twenty thousand people ...”

“... Pamela, my grandmother, is in her garden. The photograph shows a woman in the cloche hat and low, belted dress of the early Twenties; the face is smooth, and the jaw more pronounced than in the dreamy pictures of the years before the war. The sun is shining: whoever holds the camera is a favourite, neither a stranger nor a threat ...”

“... Pamela Hansford who​ ? When I asked friends and family, they vaguely knew the name but couldn’t place it – until I said she was married to C.P. Snow and then they vaguely remembered that too. They were much clearer about him: the two cultures argument, and Leavis’s vituperation, and some novels revolving around Cambridge colleges ...”

“... Montenegrin with a huge black moustache. There was Paul, a Serb, who had been a partisan and had a long scar on his cheek. There was a Slovenian hunter who wore a Tyrolean jacket and played the accordion. My mother would rustle up something to eat, and everybody would sit around the Tilley lamp and talk – about German atrocities, about the war, about the ...”

“... When​ Pamela Hansford Johnson died in 1981, the New York Times described her as ‘one of England’s best-known novelists’. I knew her name, or thought I did, but couldn’t recall the title of any of her books. Her 27 novels are mostly out of print. The New York Times briskly sets them aside, along with their author: Her death came almost a year after that of C ...”

“... collection of essays published in recent years (with one, on Richardson and Milton, dating from as long ago as 1968), is richly written, contains many sharp critical insights, and shows the author to have a good ear for nuances of language in the literary works she chooses to discuss. At the same time, she reveals some straining in her pursuit of the chief ...”

“... system’) that Macartney sought to challenge is mostly imaginary. Empires in China had long used ‘guest ritual’ to introduce persons into the presence of the emperor. Such rituals, which in China and elsewhere included prostration, had once been common across Eurasia and were still performed in many religious contexts in Macartney’s time. But ...”

“... Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and loves, above all Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Julie. These books received frenzied popular and critical acclaim, but not because they said anything about constitutions and rights, even allegorically. What they did do, according to Hunt, was to encourage readers to ...”

“... to be taken for granted, is both demanding and problematic. His heroine, Evelyn Tradescant, not long down from Newnham, finds herself drawn into the orbit of an elderly German, Baron Dietrich Gormann, known to his friends as ‘Theo’. This mysterious figure, once, some suspect, a Nazi sympathiser, but recently an Aldermaston marcher, proves to have ...”

“... idealism in favour of old-fashioned ‘humanity’. Anyone who reads McKeon’s chapter on Pamela will find it hard to resist reading or rereading Richardson’s first masterpiece (now undervalued in comparison with the much-discussed Clarissa). The epistolary technique presses to the limit the empiricist pursuit of documentary objectivity, yet ...”

“... archives. But understanding these sources requires profound study of the context. Chang provides a long bibliography, including very recent studies in Chinese, but a large number of important works are absent – Joseph Esherick’s Origins of the Boxer Uprising and Luke Kwong’s Mosaic of the Hundred Days are just two egregious omissions. Her claims ...”

“... defined and often extravagantly asymmetrical relationships were nothing new to Beckett and had long been a staple of his narratives. In Murphy the eponymous unemployed hero lounges blindfold on his rocking chair, philosophising, while his girlfriend is expected to pay for everything and obliged to prostitute herself to do so. Murphy is really sorry about ...”

“... just as such lines allowed people to forgive the diarist Alan Clark any number of horrors so long as he raised a smile when he wrote them down. The talent to write poshly is quickly taken as the talent to write well. It remains a kind of honesty that English readers – or English readers of English writers – prize above thoughtfulness, and certainly ...”