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“... On 19 October 1844 the overweight William MakepeaceThackeray – if his travel diary tells the truth – laboriously climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops and pasted up banners advertising Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing ...”

“... which is notable for its lavish attention to the social and cultural life of objects. In novels by William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Kathleen Thompson, Henry James, Edith Wharton and others, the encounter with technology is a small step taken, often regardless, on a journey defined by an ever-shifting horizon of expectations and ...”

“... playful ingenuousness no less than his fortitude. If misfortune befell Andersen, it was nothing to Thackeray’s distress when he first set off to write The Irish Sketch-Book. His wife threw herself from the boat, was fished up, and then made another suicide attempt. Weaker men would have wriggled out of the publisher’s contract, but ...”

“... respect and was even displayed in the Louvre when Napoleon was planning to follow the example of William the Conqueror; also that Carlyle’s condemnation of heartless capitalism was prompted by Jocelin de Brakelond’s 12th-century chronicle. But the best example of this dialogue between past and present is the way that the destruction of ancient monuments ...”

“... first undergraduate publication in the Cherwell gave his name as MacPiece, suggestive of William MakepeaceThackeray, an author not without Irish connections of his own. The entry on MacNeice here is another tour de force of Muldoonian free association, again revolving around ‘The Dead’. The character ...”

“... young man’ knocks at the door at Furnival’s Inn eager to illustrate Pickwick Papers – it is William MakepeaceThackeray. The coincidence is well-known to literary history, stale even. But ‘pudgy-faced’ gingers it up nicely. Kaplan’s Dickens may not entirely please the Dickensians. But its clean lines and ...”

“... cosmically titled book is a popular biography. It is also the third popular biography of Thackeray we have had in the last nine years, taking its place alongside Anne Monsarrat’s Thackeray: Uneasy Victorian (1980) and Margaret Forster’s sprightly ‘autobiography’, ...”

“... a sort of old-fashioned touch about some of it, and now and then a suggestion of Thackeray’ – which was a funny thing to mention as an afterthought, since a relished old-fashionedness is one of the book’s most persistent registers. Though it takes place mainly in the 1890s, it borrows much of its tone from the mocking, spirited irony of ...”