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“... their wickedness but because of it. Rochester is finally redeemed, but the puritanical Samuel Richardson extends no such mercy to the dastardly Lovelace, and the aristocrats of the Gothic novel are by and large more predatory than enticing. Like sexuality itself, the nobility is both attractive and alarming. In his biography of the real-life ...”

“... to paint.’In their new biography, which is nearly as long as the other three put together, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan devote nine pages to the time Bacon spent outside London. Like previous biographers, they are hampered by lack of evidence, so they have to improvise. ‘Silence can be a great surprise,’ they write. ‘Day after day of silence. No ...”

“... turn in the road. Highwaymen were proud to carry pistols because the pistol, like the sword, was a mark of status, but the pistols they carried were close-quarter weapons, to be thrust in through a coach window. The blunderbuss, too, was hopelessly inaccurate, as likely to kill the highwayman’s horse as its rider. The problem with both pistols and muskets ...”

“... For it instantly made her a public figure (readers wrote to her in a passion, as they did to Richardson, entreating her to give her novel a less sad ending); not only that, it retained a devoted readership for the next sixty or so years. (It was some of the favourite reading of Charles X, the last of the Bourbon kings.) What may be reckoned bad ...”

“... Heights, by contrast, is a tragedy (one of the astonishingly few tragic novels in England between Richardson and Hardy) because no such reconciliation is possible. These childhood texts are almost all fantasy and extravaganza, with few allusions to the dreary conditions of life experienced by their authors. ‘Nasty factories,’ the young Charlotte tells us ...”

“... conflict. (The character of Ryman, Foden notes in an afterword, draws on the real-life Lewis Fry Richardson, a relation by marriage of Foden’s father-in-law.) Meadows is supposed to wheedle information about the number out of Ryman; but, by his own account an ‘inward, unreflexive creature’, he is singularly unqualified for the job. Foden provides a ...”

“... of their own superiority, categorising those they met as ‘men, women and Italians’, as did Richardson in The History of Sir Charles Grandison. To them, Italy was not only a foreign country but a land of the past, as it was long to remain in the eyes of North Europeans. The paintings they bought in Venice, Florence and Rome were mainly views of old ...”

“... and the 1933 Supplement. In ‘deleting’ these items (‘dropping’ might be nearer the mark), was Burchfield banishing words that had earned a rightful place in the OED or was he simply removing ones that had never merited inclusion? We get an idea of what he thought he was doing from his description of the 1933 Supplement as a ‘riffraff ...”

“... misuse of the mind that makes it an enemy of life’. ‘That misuse is a distinctive mark of our scientifico-industrial civilisation.’ Lawrence is rescuing life from ‘inner mechanisation’, and Leavis is with him on the mission. We live in ‘a world of mass democracy, statistical truths and computers that can write poems’. The pejorative ...”

“... scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’). Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar ...”

“... clarity of seeing, an acknowledgment that this is what painting is. Just as the young John Richardson, visiting Braque’s studio for the first time, felt that he had arrived ‘at the very heart of painting’. But these apparently quiet artists often turn out to have been more far-sighted and more radical than we assume. Corot, for example, once ...”

“... must be one of the most readable books on the planet, with more life than you get in the whole of Richardson, Fielding and Smollett put together. Sisman gives the circumstances of Boswell’s early life with keen attention to how events might have formed the future biographer.Boswell’s father, Lord Auchinleck, was a judge, and no more of a judge than when ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... high priest in the back.’ The appropriation for radical purposes of canonical writers (Samuel Richardson in The Rape of Clarissa of 1982, Shakespeare in the series of revisionary readings of the canon which Eagleton edits for Blackwell) mirrors the attempt of Terence and his fellow authors of The Slant Manifesto (1966) to radicalise the authoritarian ...”

“... themselves, her riposte to all who have despitefully used her. They thus coincide oddly with Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-48), though in that instance the heroine has to trust that the posthumous editing of collected papers will do her justice. Both Mrs Pilkington’s Memoirs and Clarissa are works of vindication, retorts to a cruel and wrongheaded ...”