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“... so light, so effortless, so unforced. The later, censored films are set in a buttoned-up jungle; Jane’s hemlines drop, and she grows ever more brisk. Violence is pervasive. Native helpers are dispatched in negligent abundance: consumed by cannibals, trampled by elephants, shot by disgruntled colonists. Even the whites aren’t safe. Tarzan’s jungle home ...”

“... the reading, than is the case with the Irish Troubles and, more markedly, with The Singapore Grip. Jane Austen comes to mind, and not only because of the relative domesticity of the story, or its rather Austenish adultress, Mrs Forester: ‘We have decided to be friends, Emily and I, because we find men to be such coarse brutes, so lacking in refinement, is ...”

“... that hussies were there to be beaten, and had to defend herself at the Middlesex Sessions. Even Jane Austen said of a neighbour’s late-term miscarriage: ‘I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.’ Once one starts to look, revelry in suffering is everywhere to be seen. Dickie’s unflinching chapter on ‘Cripples, Hunchbacks and the ...”

“... example. Each put up with their respective lots: the Nazis and tuberculosis. What father, and what champion of martyrdom, is going to include his daughter’s detailed description of her vulva (‘In the upper part, between the outer labia, there’s a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That’s the clitoris’), or her haughty ...”

“... a proper, placid and pleasant surface may seem to carry us back to ordinary life in the way that Jane Austen did. Our emphasis today on the healthiness of sex, Aids-causing tactics always excluded, and its place in society as a kind of domestic football, narrows a once spacious emotional area. Where the tender passions are concerned almost everything used to ...”

“... excessively linear, solipsistic way of thinking’. Surely this is overstated: the letters of Jane Austen or Lord Byron are quite as dash-sprinkled as Sancho’s. Equiano’s autobiography and Sancho’s letters, both recently reprinted, are worth recovering, and have had a powerful influence on black British authors. Sandhu notes that several of the ...”

“... its central topic. Groom would scarcely allow himself to be drearily unreconstructed enough to champion truth and reality against the frissons of fakery. ‘Can forgery be defined,’ he inquires, ‘without a debilitating recourse to words like real, true or authentic?’ Such terms may have a debilitating ring to them in Soho clubs, but perhaps rather ...”

“... of intervening rooms. Emerging into prominence in 17th-century Italy, corridors found an early champion in John Vanbrugh, whose designs for Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard modelled the new arrangement of a series of rooms opening off a long central axis. The idea gained wide currency during the Enlightenment, Luckhurst notes, as a ‘rational ...”

“... elusive butterflies. He became famous, not, as he had hoped, as an imaginative writer, but as the champion propagandist of the new in art, in constant demand as a lecturer on everything connected with visual art, so that he turned into what he called ‘a sort of wandering Jew of British Culture’. Such fame left him deeply discontented. In manner gentle and ...”

“... of contemporary publishing in Britain is the boom in cheap, paperback ‘classic’ fiction. Jane Austen, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy and Dickens sell (in World’s Classics and Penguin Classics editions alone) up to fifty thousand copies a year of their most popular works in volumes costing £5 or less (more in the upmarket Everyman line). Cumulative ...”

“... shameless faker’ – a view later revised – and his ‘dungaree-wearing Lizzie wife’, Jane, whose own arrangement was the mirror-image of Burroughs’s with Joan. There is also Auden’s secretary Alan Ansen, who gets no credit here for working on the Naked Lunch manuscript with Ginsberg. Auden himself is briskly invoked (‘Auden say I am a ...”

“... in front of her and her enigmatic profile turned towards the darkness; the figure beside her is Jane, or Jeanie, born two years later. The girl in the red dress to the left is eight-year-old Mary Louisa, named after her mother and also known as ‘Isa’. The child sitting on the floor with the rosy-cheeked doll between her legs is Julia, the youngest at ...”

“... surprisingly, the catalogue commentary requires the combined efforts of Colin Amery, Mary Lutyens, Jane Brown, John Cornforth, Gavin Stamp and John Summerson to do justice to an architect whose career, in its range, dimensions and achievements, outshines Wren, Vanbrugh and the Adam brothers. Cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples: Lutyens made ...”

“... name by prosecuting her husband. In the way in which it is told, we can detect the influence of Jane Barker’s strongly autobiographical novels. A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723), for example, examines (often ironically) a variety of patterns of female living: the heroine Galesia is a poet, a woman who has loved and lost, and a shrewd observer of ...”

“... This is why, after the end of the marriage comedy, which became so remarkable a vehicle in Jane Austen’s hands, the stories and destinies of women come to offer the richest raw material for literature: they are stories of failure, epitomised in the novel of adultery. It is women’s compensation for their exclusion from the Bildungsroman as such, and ...”