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“... He’s a derivative of the detective heroes of Edgar Allan Poe and Emile Gaboriau, matched with a Boswell figure (Watson) to act as stooge and narrator, with a few added clichés from the Victorian literary bazaar. Dickens and the melodrama supplied fog and gaslight; Stevenson, Wilde and Pater props and accessories: revolver, boxing gloves, jack-knife, briar ...”

“... He was not, he recognised, one of nature’s diarists. He lacked the confessional itch of a Boswell, the bureaucrat’s recording instinct of a Pepys. Only once, during the dark years of the Great War, did he turn the scrutiny of his art, like Virginia Woolf, upon himself. In January 1917 he started a detailed journal of his life at Ayot St Lawrence ...”

“... Ackroyd is in any sense dishonest, but he is trapped in the contradiction of being Dickens’s Boswell and Dickens’s ‘creator’ – a contradiction inherent in the different arts of biography and fiction. Novelists should be original and inimitable, only begetters. Novels which are like other novels are necessarily inferior novels. The same is not ...”

“... John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906-92) was a devotee of the poetry of A.E. Housman. He wrote a vivid introduction to Housman’s verse, whose tight control, both of metre and of homosexual passion, found obvious echoes in his own character. Sparrow was also co-author of A.E. Housman: An Annotated Hand-List, one of the few excursions into modern bibliography made by this great collector, 17th century bibliographer and connoisseur of Renaissance Latin, who counselled aspiring bibliomaniacs: (1) never lend anyone a book; (2) never sell a book; (3) never give anyone a book; (4) never read a book ...”

“... acquaintance which encouraged Field to write in May 1968, ‘answering an unplaced ad to be your Boswell. The reply to my proposal (28 May) was warm approval and the hyperbolic though flattering assurance that Nabokov could not imagine anyone else whom he would want to accept as his biographer.’ Nabokov acceded to his young disciple’s offer despite a ...”

“... a matter of days,’ Ross writes, ‘he had become the man of his book.’ The 20-year-old James Boswell was inspired to verses in which the success of Tristram Shandy was conflated with the novelist’s own éclat. He pictured the author who was also his own character, enjoying his celebrity as he made his appearance in London’s most fashionable pleasure ...”

“... Why must we exist in perpetual uncertainty (only ended by death) as to whether we are well or ill? John Donne speaks of illness as an invader, which sets up a kingdom and conceals ‘secrets of State, by which it will proceed, and not be bound to declare them’. So profound are the effects of the belief that we are ill that hypochondria must be seen as a ...”

“... night as the mother, and for oblivion. When his friend Horace Traubel, who also wanted to be his Boswell, interrogated Whitman about events in his life, the poet had no trouble combining a benevolent openness with the slyest possible duplicity. As to Edward Carpenter later on – he was always much more on his guard with homoerotic English visitors ...”

“... with a touch’) and they themselves were advertised: ‘To be SOLD. A Black Girl, the Property of John Bull, Eleven Years of Age, who is extremely handy, works at her Needle tolerably, and speaks English perfectly well. Enquire of Mrs Owen, at the Angel Inn, behind St Clement’s Church, the Strand.’ Huge, ornate images of negroes were displayed outside ...”

“... such as a soldier might display in battle. Dr Johnson, praising the quality of courage, told Boswell: ‘We have more respect for a man who robs boldly on the highway than for a fellow who jumps out of a ditch and knocks you down behind your back.’ Barabbas as a footpad was contemptible, but Barabbas armed and riding a fine horse was up for ...”

“... as it does the world of Capote. And that is one of the book’s strengths: Plimpton, like James Boswell, is an enthusiast for the world he is conjuring; he knows it well, knows all the figures in the carpet; the people are for the most part his acquaintances too, and his way of arranging their words is bent by his own understanding of how it all was. Though ...”

“... Three modern biographers have set out to fill the gap. R.H. Super has delivered his book first; N. John Hall’s and Victoria Glendinning’s Trollopes are still to come. Sportingly, Super subtitles his biography ‘A Life’, leaving open the possibility that this may not turn out to be the life. But at least he has the consolation of being first past the ...”

“... Mellon Centre in London, which has now published it as this Dictionary, under the editorship of John Ingamells. The Dictionary is unique in its comprehensiveness. No traveller from the British Isles or the British colonies in America who was spotted anywhere in Italy has been omitted, even if no more than his or her surname is known. The Mellon Centre’s ...”

“... William Small was teaching Rhetoric and Belles Lettres to Jefferson at William and Mary. By 1768 John Witherspoon from the Laigh Kirk, Paisley, was basing his Princeton lectures on Blair’s Rhetoric. In 1781 Wither spoon coined the pejorative term ‘Americanism’, by analogy with ‘Scotticism’. Strong connections between Scottish and American cultures ...”

“... it derives somewhat from Yeats and from Eliot, and in this country friends of mine, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. And a rather strange position was built up. There were great arguments that poetry was a form of knowledge, at least as valid as scientific knowledge, and in certain ways more so, because it didn’t abstract from experience. We claimed any ...”