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“... Lyndon Johnson always believed he would be president. As a boy in Texas, growing up in poor and sometimes desperate circumstances, he told anyone who would listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted.’ It meant first establishing himself in state politics, then winning a seat in the House of Representatives, then moving up to the Senate and finally to the highest office ...”

“... and a serious sociological thinker as well as a novelist. Some glory goes, too, to Joseph Johnson, the radical publisher who took on the role of good father, brother and supportive friend, giving her work when she needed it and publishing everything she offered. This inevitably included some hack work; and she might have been still better served by ...”

“... and poetry counted in the general scale of human conduct and doing one’s duty. Nor would Dr Johnson. It was the Romantics who were to become a moral law unto themselves, although, to be fair to them, Wordsworth and Coleridge would no more have seen things in that light than did the virtuous brother-in-law Robert Southey. It is, in fact, curious that, as ...”

“... Knight, chair of the Commons culture committee and a member of the NZSG: ‘In the short term, [Johnson] needs to abolish the VAT on energy bills and get rid of the green taxes.’ In March, Nigel Farage wrote in the Mail on Sunday that ‘net zero is net stupid’ and was taking Britain down ‘a ruinous path’. A comment piece in the Telegraph said net ...”

“... the chance, the mute inglorious Miltons. And that raises a historical question about women such as Virginia Woolf’s imaginary Judith Shakespeare, which Zachary Leader, determined to leave no aspect of the topic unexamined, tries to answer in his final pages. Peculiar to one profession it may be, but as this intelligent, and only from time to time laborious ...”

“... and Connolly are targets for the hardest knocks in the book. The stories come in various sizes. Virginia Woolf called Isaiah Berlin a ‘violent Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the effect that at his funeral or synagogue memorial service an earwitness friend of mine heard two old Oxford panjandrums agree that the service had gone well – ‘but ...”

“... his stepfather. Hughdie was, Vidal said, ‘a magnum of chloroform’. He also owned an estate in Virginia, a farm and a mansion at Newport and an apartment on Park Avenue. His mother had Standard Oil shares. ‘He ejaculated,’ Vidal wrote in his memoir Palimpsest, ‘normally, but without that precedent erection which women require as, if nothing ...”

“... dressed with garlic and olive oil – and then finds herself too miserable to eat it. Steely Virginia Woolf used food ideologically in her books. The great boeuf en daube of To the Lighthouse embodies the texture of the life of a bourgeois family: cook has been two days making it; Mrs Ramsay presides over it; but it is tiresome Mr Ramsay, sulky and ...”

“... bewilderment at the ‘readiness with which the postwar generation throws in the sponge’. When Virginia Woolf, saddened by the death of her nephew Julian Bell in Spain, called on women to see that Fascism, war and patriotism were all the work of men and adopt a principled pacifism, Rathbone dismissed her out of hand, quite careless of the fact that most ...”

“... The Civil War had been over for a week. Lincoln had already walked the streets of Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital, taking in the devastation at first hand. ‘The only people who showed themselves were negroes,’ the radical senator Charles Sumner noted. The president had been thinking about what would happen after the war since 1862, when ...”

“... cast of household names excited Victorian readers in the same way that Boswell’s Life of Johnson did, or a Thackeray novel in which characters encountered Addison and Steele in taverns. Someone famous was sure to turn up on each page: Joshua Reynolds, perhaps, or Mrs Siddons, or mad King George III. The diary gave ‘fresh colours to the pale and ...”

“... Lovers, the book strikes many young readers as a chestnut, maybe even an obstacle on the road to Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon and Alice Walker, while the later novels just look ‘weird’. On the one hand, the author of Women in Love is too damn serious, too damn end-of-the-world to be any fun in a world of MTV; on the other hand, the creator of The Woman ...”

“... be on the premises, told me that ‘the real star of the show’ is Francis Guy’s Harpers Ferry, Virginia, painted in 1808, fifty years before John Brown’s famous raid on the federal armory, which was meant to inspire a slave insurrection across the South. Guy, who follows the classical conventions of 17th-century French landscape painting, with massive ...”

“... There has been an abundance of good critical writing about Thomas Hardy, from Lionel Johnson in 1894 to our own day, but his biography has been in a curious condition from the start. The authorised version (Early Life, 1928; Later Years, 1930) is supposed to be by Florence, his second wife, but is wholly composed from notes by Hardy himself, and for the most part actually dictated by him ...”

“... that his concept of the ‘stream of consciousness’ influenced the works of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, but his major literary legacy may have been an unwitting contribution to the prose style of Gertrude Stein. James’s masterpiece, which took him 12 years to write, was the two-volume Principles of Psychology. Published in 1890, it is still worth ...”