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“... as sometimes happens, the changes on the surface only served to emphasise what was already there. James Wood coined the term ‘hysterical realism’ to describe her first novel, White Teeth, but it only really applied to what was most on display – the foisonning, punning, teasing, literary surface. The surface changed for each of Smith’s novels, but the ...”

“... Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those Englishmen who ...”

“... as a foundation for her future trade. But it will strike some as a piece of sentimentality. As James Baldwin put it in Nobody Knows My Name, ‘children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. They must, they have no other models.’ That may be the brute reality of the situation: nobody ever gets ...”

“... and the great beauty of the ‘other book’ come partly from the dissonance of its elements. James Barrie noted in 1922 that ‘long after writing P. Pan its true meaning came back to me – desperate attempt to grow up but can’t.’ Le Grand Meaulnes is about adolescents who want to want not to grow up, but fail. Alain-Fournier, as has been pointed ...”

“... moved on; they could only sit and read, or play with their Meccano in the thoroughfare of the hall. Their father, retired at last, spent much of his time out, in libraries or museums; he was scarcely aware that his wife saw the boys as recurring nuisances, unwanted visitors. Andrew and Stephen were well aware of this and with sad stoicism saw that here ...”

“... and valuers, who submitted the stamp to the Royal Philatelic Society. On 30 January 1931, Thomas Hall, president of the Society, signed Certificate 14,764 of the Expert Committee, on which was written: ‘This stamp is a variety unchronicled and hitherto unknown to the Expert Committee. Having regard to the lapse of time since this stamp was issued, the ...”

“... and Hawksmoor’. Invoking those artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and ...”

“... Rainier, a shell-shocked war veteran and amnesiac, who meets and eventually marries a dance-hall singer called Paula, played by Greer Garson; he becomes ‘Smithy’ and lives with her in Devon. Some years later, during a visit to Liverpool, he slips and falls. When he regains consciousness he remembers he is Charles Rainier but has forgotten that he is ...”

“... of the modern academy. There is a methodological temptation in analysing the New Testament hall of mirrors to mistrust the text until it suits one’s argument to trust it; so Aslan is inclined to cite that extremely slippery narrative known as the Acts of the Apostles when it will back up what he wants to say. Nor does he question the ancient and ...”

“... One refers to the public human being, as when you say: ‘I’ll meet you in front of Carnegie Hall at a quarter to eight.’ The other refers to the subject of consciousness, as when you think, ‘I hear an oboe,’ or ‘cogito ergo sum.’ The argument of the book proceeds from phenomenology – an introspective examination of the subjective character ...”

“... Certainly Stoker’s dedication earned him little affection or respect. His friend the Manx writer Hall Caine said that he had ‘never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a ...”

“... in pain. ‘White Americans know very little about pleasure because they are so afraid of pain,’ James Baldwin wrote, ‘but people dulled by pain can sing and dance till morning, and find no pleasure in it.’ Holiday’s bitter-sweetness – a cocktail of the rambunctious and the rueful – spoke to both sides of this conundrum. Although she was variously ...”

“... directed by Yeats. Other founding members included O’Hara, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey and Donald Hall, all recent Harvard graduates in their early twenties, as well as those like Lurie living in and around Cambridge. Older, established poets, such as Richard Wilbur and Richard Eberhart, added gravitas to the enterprise. ‘The emotional temperature of the ...”

“... had been like. I said I wanted to go up to the Fairy Ring. For I’d had the fairy stories of James Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd read to me and he’d written of this wood, where it was dangerous to go most of the time, and especially to the Fairy Ring. The toadstools, a pale, hideous necklace of poison round the thick, mossy neck of the Ring, had been ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”