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“... in order to encompass the ‘life of the books’ as well as the ‘life of the man’? Joanna Richardson, the last chapter of whose biography was entitled ‘Stendhal and Posterity’, evidently thought one should. (Her book, incidentally, appeared only six years ago; and ‘thick and fast they come at last,’ like Lewis Carroll’s oysters.) Robert ...”

“... that Hugo Gernsback invented SF, that the ‘rise of the novel’ is synonymous with Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, there is something usefully corrective in the Companion’s counter-claims. They are not the first to be one-sided. It is astonishing, looking back at Ian Watt’s book, for instance, to find that no woman novelist figures in his account. In ...”

“... leisure – the two poles of English working-class life that would begin to switch position under Margaret Thatcher. Rugby league was an escape but also a way for a burly kid to earn money. The novel’s main character, Arthur Machin, is a classic British New Wave conundrum: fleet of foot but heavy of heart, sensitive but brutalised, free in himself but ...”

“... they evoke, and of the stories they love to tell. This is a writing ‘to the moment’, in Samuel Richardson’s phrase, which corresponds to Richardson’s achievement as an epistolary novelist and to the intimacies and immediacies of Sterne’s practice in Tristram Shandy, and which can seem to contribute to an attempt on ...”

“... Roger Lonsdale, presenting with due flourish a work by the painter and art theorist Jonathan Richardson the elder, and illuminating Richardson’s own little-known life (down to a new birth-year) as well as the career of his young friend Pope. Lonsdale never writes without managing to teach one something, a critical ...”

“... buffs, such as John and James Clark Ross, Rae, Pullen, Collinson, M’Clure, Austin, Ommanney, Richardson, Penny, DeHaven, Kane, Forsyth, Bellot, Kennedy, Belcher, Inglefield, M’Clintock – and names of ships, such as Plover, Herald, Enterprise, Investigator, Resolute, Intrepid, Assistance, Pioneer, Lady Franklin, Sophia, Felix, Advance, Rescue, Prince ...”

“... of her claim. The collection opens with a narrative immediacy that would do justice to Samuel Richardson, as EBB hastens to reaffirm the bond her marriage and flight have threatened to sever: My beloved Arabel I write to you after a thousand thoughts . . (for I have not heard a breath of any of you yet) but the strongest brings me still to writing to you ...”

“... of Diane Abbott. In the 1979 general election, which brought the Conservatives to power under Margaret Thatcher – something Harman describes as an ‘excruciating blow’ – 19 women were elected, the lowest postwar figure aside from the 17 elected in 1951. Harman became the Labour parliamentary candidate for Peckham in 1982 and that summer got ...”

“... this volume he also obtains solace of a less π-ious kind with ‘M.C.’, an adventuress called Margaret Caroline Rudd, whom he had sought out nine years earlier – at which time ‘she had been acquitted of a charge of forgery when she turned King’s evidence’, while her accomplices were sent to the gallows. Boswell’s sexuality was frequently roused ...”

“... understood that this was not the case. First, it occurred in what turned out to be the middle of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. Thatcher was a far greater pragmatist than she or many of her friends and enemies would ever admit, but she had already ducked in the face of one miners’ strike and was determined to win this one. She had also accepted the ...”

“... Petronius ... practised one of the most sophisticated techniques of the modern novel,’ and ‘Richardson had an intuitive understanding of modern psycho-pathology.’ The teleological pressure here, with the achievements of former times repeatedly being referred forward for their value, gives a certain impetus to Phelps’s story, and one can hardly help ...”

“... reproduction ‘made such an impression on me and so many others of my generation’, John Richardson later wrote.) The painting was shown in a Mayfair gallery, where it was bought by Michael Sadler, whose collection included work by Kandinsky, Rouault and Modigliani. Bacon’s next ambitious work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. John Russell ...”

“... death. I first met him in 1968 when Patrick Garland brought him backstage with Princess Margaret after Forty Years On. A friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she ...”

“... feeling, life’s only, but indelible, trace’ – would be much more appropriate in the case of Richardson or Diderot. Actually, it’s a pretty dubious claim applied to anyone other than the lachrymose protagonist of an 18th-century novel. This affinity with the heroines of sentimental fiction pays off when Lewis arrives in the 1700s. After the Hanoverian ...”

“... Greene, Huxley or the like; when starring players famous in the legitimate theatre, Olivier, Richardson, Laughton: or when wrapped in a European reputation, such as Garbo’s or Dietrich’s. Citizen Kane may not have been the first film to break through this cloying curtain of snobbery, self-satisfaction and ignorant parochialism, but never had an ...”