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“... accounts of Trollope’s life. Three modern biographers have set out to fill the gap. R.H. Super has delivered his book first; N. John Hall’s and Victoria Glendinning’s Trollopes are still to come. Sportingly, Super subtitles his biography ‘A Life’, leaving open the possibility that this may not turn out to ...”

“... The last few decades have been good for Matthew Arnold. In 1977, R.H. Super completed the 11-volume Complete Prose Works, a venture that seemed quixotic (‘all those school reports!’) when he began it in 1960. The complete Poems, edited, tidied up and annotated by Kenneth and Miriam Allott, were revised and reissued in 1979 ...”

“... Autobiography is sometimes misleading – perhaps deliberately so. Of the three biographers, R.H. Super is most suspicious of the testimony of An Autobiography and disregards it wherever he can. It is not, he says, ‘the authoritative record of events put down as they actually occurred’. Richard Mullen and Hall use An Autobiography extensively, but ...”

“... is at present writing a biography of Trollope.’ It was not a secret; nor was the fact that R.S. Super was hot on Hall’s heels (he actually overtook him on the last lap, as did the dark horse Richard Mullen). Glendinning bravely maintains that even if she had known she would not have cared: ‘if twenty professors had declared themselves to be writing ...”

“... There is nothing left for a special relationship between American puritan doctrine, the puritan super-ego and the so-called specifics of the American character. Thompson is by no means the only historian to reject the supposed identification between puritanism, prudery and repression. The stated object of his analysis, moreover, is rather different: it is ...”

“... Church-of-Englandism, progressing to the brink of conversion to Catholicism in 1871-2 – he was super-sensitive to the difficulties of maintaining faith under their multiple onslaught. He despised the ostrich attitude of some important churchmen in these matters, and had a subtle sympathy for those writers, like Arnold and Tennyson, who wished to believe ...”