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“... easy. If you want to savour the everyday experience of Victorian London, why not go to Dickens, Gissing and Mayhew, or, for industrial towns during the Depression, Priestley and Orwell? Such authors are quoted here, but less copiously than they would once have been, no doubt because their readings are now often felt to be singular or distorted. The modern ...”

“... What​ a difference six inches can make. George Orwell was shot in the neck on 20 May 1937 while fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM (roughly translatable as ‘The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification’). He was six foot two. If he’d been five foot eight the bullet would have gone through his head ...”

“... on this undertaking, and on James’s writing: there is a reference to Stevenson, and one to Gissing. Curiously, there is no reference to the author’s unsuccessful plays. His time as a failed dramatist may have convinced James of the need for passionate authorial control, of constant adverbial direction as to how sentences were said and heard. The ...”

“... his period, left a lasting manifesto of critical method. He was no provincial, admiring Goethe and George Eliot along with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. But most of what he wrote on literary matters he left unpublished, and his range was essentially French. As a critic, he is remembered today principally for his dismissal of Sainte-Beuve’s aberration in talking ...”

“... London has more of in a quarter of an hour than Boston in nine months; he begs everyone, as he did George du Maurier, ‘Do tell me everything that has, or hasn’t happened’ – and ‘everything’ includes even those subjects that in theory James isn’t much interested in, like politics and scandal. One of the most memorable and characteristic brief ...”