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“... story, but it is also the sort of thing that he himself would in principle have deplored. As Margaret Drabble emphasises, he disliked that anti-American reflex, attributing it (perhaps too simply) to simple envy. He loved the USA, where he had dozens of friends, whom he treated, so far as one can tell, with his usual amiability and generosity. Yet the ...”

“... gained considerable power, she was about as useful to other women as that other great Nietzschean, Margaret Thatcher. Elisabeth claimed that the sewing machine was responsible for feminism: it made women’s real job of domestic sewing take too little time and so left their minds too free for foolish ideas. Women who spoke of freedom were inclined to smoke ...”

“... includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If you were a patriot you read Blackwood’s ...”

“... the genre concerned has attracted other distinguished practitioners and goes back a long way. Forster, especially in the earlier novels, and Hardy, notably in The Well-Beloved and A Pair of Blue Eyes, worked in this mode. Its virtue is to free the author from two of the great constraints of realism. A novel true to the diurnal realities of ordinary life ...”

“... Philip Hoare relates one, as told by the Hon. David Herbert, about his treatment of the actress Margaret Rutherford. He cultivated her assiduously – even, more or less, proposing marriage to her – and she fell for his charms, and then when one day she came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered her by simply refusing to allow her in. The ...”

“... Miller scrupulously records the tremors of strange unrest in novels by the well known (Bennett, Forster, Galsworthy) and the less well known (Ada Leverson, M.P. Willcocks). She points out that, while these novels exposed and tested particular marriages, they did not question the institution itself. In her view, three writers only – Amber Reeves, Olivia ...”

“... and vices of that condition; if there was Schlegel in him there was also Wilcox. One thinks of Margaret Schlegel’s naive resolve, under Wilcoxian influence, to be less polite to the servants: but although Annan reports many gentlemanly activities with an air of detachment or even disapproval, he does not find it necessary to use the word ...”

“... lifetime, that she could not ‘make things up’, and of course it irritated her. She hated what Forster called the novelist’s ‘faking’ and the death of Rachel in The Voyage Out can be seen as a protest against the way death is managed in fiction. Of the death of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove she wrote in her Diary that ‘There is a great ...”

“... about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the purple goose-pimpled legs of English women in miniskirts. She wrote about air raids and ...”

“... as controls a small group of novels by others. They are Henry James’s The Awkward Age, E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, together with two modern attempts to imitate Austen’s Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He conducts some tests comparing the idiolects ...”

“... of this novel, the well-intentioned editor must survey the number plans and MS (which, thanks to Forster, survive); the proofs which Dickens corrected for the first serialised-in-monthly-numbers issue, put out by Bradbury and Evans in 1849-50; volume versions prepared for the European and American markets; and three single-volume reprints, published by ...”

“... Maginn, and the painter Daniel Maclise. Though the rumours put an end to her engagement to John Forster in 1835, nothing surfaced that she and her friends could not refute or explain away, and once she was dead, and in such a manner, the scandals faded into the background. It was said that she died of an accidental overdose, of tropical disease, that she ...”

“... are, and they have come to dread the direct untreated response by their students, pronouncing E.M. Forster soppy, or Virginia Woolf a bit of a bitch. High-tech negates such responses, rescuing itself from social and worldly critical converse – the medium in which the novel naturally swims. To discuss in the old fashion the characters of War and Peace or Anna ...”

“... they can hear his voice on the radio in the hotel bar below. He is present in this novel much as Margaret Thatcher is in The Ploughman’s Lunch – to root the story in the real. McEwan uses current affairs much as a rock band uses drums or a salesman uses a smile. The fact that Macmillan is still in power also helps us to be convinced by Florence’s ...”

“... Solomon’s Mines takes the form mainly of exhaustingly oracular pronouncements: there is none of Forster’s anxiety, or Kipling’s affection. Foulata is a tribeswoman who falls in love with Good, and risks her life to save him. When she dies – the noble native woman always dies in Haggard – Quatermain feels ‘bound to say … that I consider her ...”