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“... Fanny Price, Anne Elliot – have a relation to their creator which is ingeniously compounded in Emma, the heroine whom ‘no one but myself will like’, who said things that Jane Austen would probably herself have wished to say. The novel never admits that gossip is its life, moral matters only its underpinning. As Dr Spacks remarks, ‘fiction exercised ...”

“... by chamber, like a temple from which an adventurer is feverishly tearing’ – the Indiana Jones reference here has its own part to play in the teasing genre game, a delicate puncturing function. In​ a couple of stories Machado lavishes an extra layer of fantastical patterning on a single panel in the design. In the rather downbeat fantasy ‘Real ...”

“... repeatedly cites the claim that Charlie Parker became Charlie Parker only because the drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him and almost took his head off. True to the theory, Simmons hits and humiliates his students constantly until one day our boy secretly denounces him and Simmons loses his job. The trouble is that our boy was in agreement with Simmons all ...”

“... a translator – the different obstacles to fluent indeterminacy offered by French and English. As Emma Ramadan, its translator, points out, these formal choices affect and even determine the development of the narrative. If the text must avoid a tense like the passé composé that is unable, with forms such as je suis allé(e), to keep gender questions ...”

“... electrical appliance is innocent. ‘The little radio made its noises,’ we’re told in Great Jones Street, ‘fierce as a baby, never listening to itself. This was America’s mechanical voice, its doll voice, coughing out slogans into the dawn, testing itself in the event of emergency, station after station fading away into the suffering breath of the ...”

“... Clyde’s – her father was a brick mason, which was at least a trade. In 1914, he died, leaving Emma, Bonnie’s mother, alone with three children. They moved to Cement City, where Emma worked in a garment factory sewing overalls. The teenage Bonnie won poetry competitions and often boasted that one day her name would be ...”

“... at all except as a figment of one man’s amour fou. The exception is the Hazlitt scholar Stanley Jones. In the late 1960s he succeeded in tracing a direct descendant of Sarah’s younger brother, Micaiah Walker. He pursued certain trails this opened up for him, and published his findings about her and her family in his biography, William Hazlitt: A Life ...”

“... but it wasn’t true. Two celebrated cases in which Freud plays rather a poor part – those of Emma Eckstine and of Ida Bauer (Dora) – are analysed closely by the authors. Eckstine he referred during her treatment to his slightly lunatic colleague Fliess for an unnecessary nasal operation. When Fliess nearly killed her by leaving a roll of gauze in the ...”

“... biggest-selling record of 2004. Shortly after their second album came out in the summer of 2006, Emma, in need of a new computer, looked into how much her old promo might be worth. A secondhand record dealer offered her £380. According to an internet fansite, however, the two or three that had been sold on eBay had gone for around twice that. Since I ...”

“... names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he’s not going to be a cad, is he? The fact that Austen ...”

“... not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad’ sounds like something Emma Goldman might have said, but it has no attribution. Sometimes a quoted passage – about whether angels need to sleep, for instance (the answer: ‘it is unlikely, though we cannot be completely sure)’ – is presented inside a rectangular border of ...”

“... to feel superior to Connell, in despair at the library closing while he was engrossed in Emma: It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another. But there it is: literature moves him. One of his professors calls it ‘the pleasure of being touched by great art’. In those words it almost sounds ...”

“... shared no man’s land seems oddly larger than the territory disputed. The opening move was Ernest Jones’s three-decker monument (1953-57), and his successors make us choose a Freud, as if to write this life without a case to prove were impossible. If we need more lives of Freud it is because there is safety in numbers, but the evidential burden tends to ...”

“... A second problem looks simple enough but can never be resolved. Why write a Life of Smith or Mrs Jones, and why should it be read? The Rousseauistic answer is that any life (especially mine, but even yours perhaps) is of interest if it can evoke a tear; and the reading public has been told, chiefly in autobiographies, how many a tender branch was ...”

“... even if he didn’t point it out himself, that in this era it was still an affront to leave Tom Jones on your mother’s drawing-room table. To read Bohemia, then look again at Swallows and Amazons, might make for a sense of eerie discontinuity. Ransome’s first original fiction for children retains an air of complete mastery. The story, slight in itself ...”