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“... there are visions based on, and in an approximation to the style of, Great Expectations, Conan Doyle, Robinson Crusoe and Malory (with just a dash of The Waste Land – Eliot’s fingerprints are all over this book). There is a dream of a music lesson taught by William Byrd, a history of English poetry in the manner of ...”

“... On 19 October 1844 the overweight William Makepeace Thackeray – if his travel diary tells the truth – laboriously climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops and pasted up banners advertising Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point ...”

“... referring to ‘pecuniary sacrifices from his fondness & his folly’, was prophetic: the boy, William, received financial support for years to come. Cockayne suggests that the philandering earl may not, in fact, have been William’s father: perhaps it was Frederick, a dashing naval officer and a favoured nephew of the ...”

“... is of the Irish saloon variety, with homosexuality in evidence: Walt Whitman’s boyfriend, Pete Doyle, hovers in the wings. There is always a danger of bawdy breaking in and distracting us from the great events. But Gore Vidal checks himself firmly, and the ‘low life’ scenes have their function, both in ‘tea-tabling’ the narrative or bringing us ...”

“... States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony ...”

“... and re-crossed by many of the novelists he most admires, including the three (Angela Carter, William Golding and Angus Wilson) to whose memory his book is dedicated. The result is a history of the modern novel in which the coincidence of the mainstream and the canon are taken for granted. D.J. Taylor also confines a his attentions to mainstream fiction ...”

“... On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness ...”

“... of Sinclair’s narrative. Some are ‘presences’ which have escaped from the writings of Conan Doyle, Stevenson or Rabbi Loew. Like the figures from Blake’s Jerusalem that spill into the London of Sinclair’s Suicide Bridge (1979), these are fictions which, having ‘laid out a template ... more powerful than any local documentary account’, have gone ...”

“... knowing the origin of the substance in front of you, inorganic slime can often seem part of what William Ian Miller, in The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), called ‘the organic world of generative rot … life soup, fecundity itself’. For most of history, as Lehoux points out, spontaneous generation was a fact, not a theory. The distinction between muddy slime ...”

“... have become, too much aware of what might theoretically be made of contemporary social situations. William Trevor’s Felicia’s Journey should have been a very good novel but failed to be, because the author gave up his own involuntary and unconscious literary personality in favour of a plot that must have looked absolutely right – too right – for this ...”

“... advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s ‘rank growth’. Dickens was true neither to life nor to his age. He was a cartoonist rather than a documentarist – not that the veracity of documentarists is to be ...”

“... males can rewrite a life. Schreiner gets into the DNB as an appendix to her lawyer brother William. William is not mentioned in the Companion entry, even as an appendix. The Companion is careful to note that Olive’s mother, ‘a brilliant, exacting Englishwoman’, ‘once beat her for using an Afrikaans ...”

“... this point on, there was no holding children’s books or their illustrators: Cruikshank, Tenniel, Doyle, Arthur Hughes and many others all contribute greatly to the decorativeness of Victorian England, as it’s preserved for later generations. Technical advances soon acted as a spur to artists and publishers alike. Edmund Evans, after about 1870, perfected ...”

“... began defining ‘The Playboy Philosophy’ – a kind of ‘hedonistic utilitarianism’, as William F. Buckley put it. The magazine was originally designed, Hefner admitted, as a ‘romantic reflection of earlier times’. His achievement was to associate sex with upward mobility by making his readers feel they were part of an elite gentlemen’s ...”

“... and fetch good prices too, chief justices, lords lieutenant, lords mayor, George Moore, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Walter Osborne, Jack Yeats, my famous namesake his brother Bill, Padraic Colum, John Millington Synge, young painters like Paddy Tuohy who really did paint old J.S. Joyce and died of his own hand, poor Sean O’Sullivan who died of ...”