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“... away.If there are other writers who competed as professional runners, I’m not aware of them. (Samuel Beckett was a good sprinter but that was in his schooldays.) To Coppard, the importance of running was that it taught him he was best over a short distance, a lesson he applied to his fiction. Though he published many collections of stories, he never ...”

“... were much needed. By 1782, the masters of the mid-century were all dead: Fielding in 1754, Richardson in 1761, Sterne in 1768 and Smollett in 1771. Among his contemporaries, only Frances Burney was at the height of her powers. Neither Ann Radcliffe, whose Gothic romances would soon enjoy immense popularity, nor the younger radical novelists such as ...”

“... resisted the temptation to fill in blanks but commented at length on the canon from Shakespeare to Richardson; William Blundell, a member of the Catholic Lancashire gentry, who drew up a document of ‘Scriptura Difficultis’, puzzling away at ‘the many appearing incongruityes and other hard things to be found’ in the Bible. Most remarkable of all is John ...”

“... daughter, he subscribed to the founding of Voysey’s Theistic Church, along with Charles Darwin, Samuel Courtauld and several Wedgwoods. History was being ironical again when it allowed two of his 11 children to be knighted ‘for services to conservative newspapers and the imperial ideal’. Ivy’s father Walter was not one of these but a close friend of ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... sentiment and unlikelihood’. ‘Mr Fielding’, ‘Mrs Fielding’, ‘Mrs Lennox’, ‘Mr Richardson’, ‘Mr Smollett’ and ‘Mr Sterne’ are at the narrator’s elbow, and a sneaky pre-echo of Mr Conrad addresses the ‘immense darkness’ of the continent beyond. Another unnamed presence might be Mr James, whose list of the ‘items of high ...”

“... sociability, she meets and describes many of the characters of the age. She is befriended by Samuel Johnson and passes the days in Mrs Thrale’s coterie at Streatham. She records the bluestocking salons of Elizabeth Montagu (material for some savage vignettes in The Witlings). Garrick frequently turns up at the Burney home in Leicester Fields to ...”

“... for MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse, or without remembering for a second that Samuel Beckett once asked his friend Con Leventhal to betake himself ‘to the Dublin Post Office and measure the height of the ground to Cúchulainn’s arse’, as Neary in his novel Murphy wished to engage with the arse of the statue of Cúchulainn, the ...”

“... Tuke, the painter of bathing boys. Three or four are mere suspects, followed by question marks: Samuel Butler? Luca Signorelli? Forster had presumably seen those great paeans to the male buttocks, Signorelli’s frescoes in Orvieto cathedral, and come to an irresistible conclusion. A felt kinship with Whitman was fairly predictable for a gay writer at the ...”

“... on Mary Kennard where the Companion records that she was the daughter of one Charles Faber ‘not Samuel Laing, as sometimes claimed’. The Laing claim is made in my Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (which also has a grotesquely wrong date of death for Kennard) and in R.L. Wolff’s Nineteenth-Century Fiction, A Bibliographical Catalogue. The ...”

“... to be an expert commentator on vanity’s machinations: Auden said something disparaging about Samuel Beckett getting the Nobel Prize for Literature. Nikos said: ‘Who else is there?’ Auden shook his head so all the sagging wrinkles shook and said: ‘There’s me.’ At Kitaj and Sandra’s, we met a coroner, who said that there was nothing more ...”

“... even in the official wisdom which Blake’s proverbs – or Oscar Wilde’s, or Shaw’s, or Samuel Butler’s – so explicitly revise. This is wise, but can itself do with some revisionary denial. For, in resisting the idea that these contraries show ‘the moral emptiness of proverbial formulation’, Hollander does make it sound as if the reason why ...”

“... pausing for pathos or innuendo, or reaching for the next surprise – renders this liveliness. Richardson called his epistolary method ‘writing to the moment’; Sterne’s was a comparable dedication of the novel’s resources to life’s momentariness. Though he seems consciously to have brought Tristram Shandy to an end after Volume IX (its fifth ...”

“... to display his rugs and furniture. Rab Butler, then a young MP, and his wife, Sydney Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld’s daughter, commissioned him to design their dining room. Interior design led to a growing circle of acquaintance, including with the Australian painter Roy de Maistre. In his memoir, Patrick White remembers de Maistre as ‘a snob’ who ...”

“... Acceptable glories – the knighting of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Francis Chichester, visits by Samuel Pepys, location work for the latest Jane Austen or for Harrison Ford (more bombs) in Patriot Games – are trumpeted, while the dark history of the Greenwich marshes, a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a ...”