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“... seething with wit and brilliance from the likes of Johnson, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, courtly politicians, cheerful whores, fine lords and ladies, down-at-heel actresses, a time of ‘free-flowing claret and sexual anarchy’, as Roger Hutchinson puts it. Strutting and tumbling through it all – and, of course concocting this ...”

“... conscience on the Anglican priest. (This part of the story is adapted, very movingly, from Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.) At Oxford, and desperately poor, Oscar is serenely confident God will provide, and so he does, at the race track and dog fights and the card table. A toss of a coin convinced him that God needs him as a missionary to New South ...”

“... likely extent of his readers’ acquirements. A great many people know that dentists commonly wear white jackets; a smaller but still substantial section of society has had the opportunity of observing that stewards on passenger aircraft are (or at one time were) similarly attired. Almost anybody of sufficient education to find the word ‘haemophilia’ even ...”

“... in a quite unprecedented way on their right to pass judgment on the deeds of important dead white males, and to tell and publish the story of the polities that they lived in. Bridget Hill neglects this broader intellectual context for a more narrowly biographical approach in this study of Catharine Macaulay, but hers is still a considerable achievement ...”

“... wasn’t, or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing the ...”

“... up as a woman when the moon is full. Scobie is the best kind of Orientalist. He walks like ‘a White Man at large’, and he loves the Egyptians. ‘You see, the Egyptians are marvellous, old man,’ he tells Darley. ‘Kindly. They know me well. From some points of view they might look like felons, old man, but felons in a state of grace, that’s what I ...”

“... 18 now known to have been killed: John Ashton, William Bradshaw, Thomas Buckley, James Crompton, Edmund Dawson, Margaret Downes, William Evans, William Fildes, Samuel Hall, Mary Heyes, Sarah Jones, John Lees, Arthur O’Neill, Martha Partington, John Rhodes, Joseph Whitworth, and two special constables, John Ashworth and Robert Campbell. There were ...”

“... in connection with four murders. He is offered wine, and not just any wine but the 2004 white that Commandant Danglard sources from a small grower in the Sancerrois. The suspect enjoys the wine, asking if he can have the details of the supplier. But he’s still reluctant to talk, reluctant above all to cry in front of the cops. They promise him ...”

“... sans situation qu’instable’. He is describing homosexuals, whom he calls ‘inverts’, and to Edmund White’s analysis of this passage in The Proust Project – White sees Proust’s writing on homosexuality as both ‘venomous’ in certain of its assumptions and productive in the sheer array of its ...”

“... Civil Service to Indians (largely because the entry exams continued to be held in London), when white settlers protested against a bill that allowed European defendants to be tried by Indian judges, Indians invoked the queen’s proclamation – and the white settlers denounced it. Loyalty to the queen was part of the ...”

“... literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest ...”

“... him in Proust, but Gide’s observation reminds us that it is pointless to get so worked up – as Edmund Wilson did – about Proust’s dogmas on love, jealousy or sex. These are indeed not intended to prove anything. We come to accept them, surely, as bees in the bonnet of an old friend, for it is one of the last secrets of Proust’s art (and, in ...”

“... once told his son that he couldn’t imagine learning a new language in order to write a book, as Edmund Wilson had done. The achievement of this biography is to have restored ‘Dwight’, as Wreszin calls him, to his proper place as the guardian and transmitter of a noble lineage of dissent, as the author of some essays that will be read for longer than ...”

“... with a large round head going bald down the forehead. A pigmy waxed moustache too small for the white upper lip, a round and rather long chin. Pale and hollow between nose and cheeks, and bright, colourless, vain eyes. Those eyes he opens wide when he looks and smiles at a woman. A drawling voice and a sneer at the right [‘left’ crossed out] corner of ...”

“... And while the audience may be granted a knowledge of Iago’s plots, or the true nature of Edmund and Macbeth, superior to that of any of the characters on stage, this knowledge is scarcely the guarantee of a happy ending. To do him justice, Evans does pause briefly midway through Shakespeare’s Tragic Practice to ask himself the crucial question. The ...”