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“... genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels rather boring and melodramatic, has decided that elderly authors who have ‘ceased for ...”

“... egregious banker Edward Clodd, a hanger-on of literary men and a candid friend, who observed of Hardy at the time of his second marriage that he was ‘a great writer but not a great man’, recorded Meredith’s presence at the Omar Khayyam Club dinner, where both Hardy and George Gissing spoke in his honour. They spoke ...”

“... the kind who were starting to take package trips to Benidorm instead – we, like the rest of the hardy self-improving lower middle classes, were bound for places where farmhouse bed and breakfasts cowered beneath looming ridges of wet, windswept heather, where there were ample supplies of fiddle music, and where every fishing village and handicrafts ...”

“... of words and things and half-grasped insights – soon after, I had the same experience with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, chosen because of the Degas on the cover – seems to me the pattern of most readerly initiations. We aren’t drawn in by the argument, or what’s said or shown. Rather something feels right, smells right, in the colour and ...”

“... was so distant, hidden or commonplace that its appearance would be unrecorded for long. Bert Hardy, who was present at the D-Day landings and helped uncover atrocities in Korea, also took pictures of street life at the Elephant and Castle. There is, of course, another history to be told, one that follows changes in the style of prints and considers them ...”

“... could seize on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...”

“... his story as we knew the life of Nelson or St George. There was no such moving image for Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog (or Rottweiler) as there is not for Nelson’s Hardy or St George’s horse; the acts of the chief apostle are not celebrated. We know Huxley as a photograph or a cartoon: heavy-jawed and ...”

“... the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that their ...”

“... It also brought her undisguised insults. Stung by Mrs Oliphant’s review of Jude the Obscure, Hardy exclaimed: ‘That a woman who purely for money’s sake has for the last thirty years flooded the magazines and starved out scores of better workers, should try to write down rival novelists whose books sell better than her own, caps all the shamelessness ...”

“... Stevenson found the core of his talent. It all started with a spirited exchange in print with Henry James. In September 1884, when Stevenson was new to that oasis of convalescents, he picked up a copy of Longman’s Magazine, which carried James’s essay ‘The Art of Fiction’. He knew James only at a distance, and admired him. Stevenson, who had ...”

“... miserable to witness. The whole process has by now become a large-scale version of the Laurel and Hardy film of two men who vengefully destroy each other’s car and house piece by piece, tit-for-tat, and while they glower and puff through many ‘take thats’ the world around them gets wiped out. As the struggle for power and territory continues in ...”

“... of – we agreed on this. 20 May. Seeing a handsome Dorset woman at a petrol pump I thought a Hardy heroine of today might well follow such an occupation. Tess for instance. Hardy is said to have modelled Tess on a waitress seen in a Weymouth teashop, the sort of place that Pym herself loved to haunt, but neither Tess ...”

“... the Church had already been recognised in England. His books had been publicly burned in 1521, and Henry VIII – assisted by Thomas More, who had previously, in a learned Erasmian context, been inclined to pooh-pooh the threat – had defended the doctrine of the Seven Sacraments. The year after Luther’s Testament, More published pseudonymously, on his own ...”

“... and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust. 2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a handsome, though rather explosive-looking young workman who is emptying sand onto the pavement ...”

“... to relieve it, and all passions there came down to dollars in the end. For Baudelaire, long before Henry Miller’s air-conditioned nightmare, the United States were a gaslit wasteland. The universal exhibitions held in Paris, with their monstrous displays of American machines and technological knowhow, added to the portentous image. Civilisation was clearly ...”