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“... is so much cut-and-paste soup. In the final article in this section the political scientist James Miller asks ‘Is Bad Writing Necessary?’ This is essentially a comparison of Orwell and Adorno as models of criticism, and you can guess who wins. But in fact no one does: the opposition serves neither, since the intellectual difficulty of Adorno is associated ...”

“... of her work, particularly her notorious (but very scholarly) MLA convention paper on ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’; some critics mock the self-centredness of her writing (‘simply to publish a memoir of one’s own psychotherapy requires grandiosity of a certain kind,’ one reviewer protested). Sedgwick is also noted for her ...”

“... who made her sit on a coil of wet rope on the Embankment when she won the Booker (‘Jane Bown . . . tells me that when Lord Snowdon came to photograph Anita B. he pinned her at the back with clothes pegs and she was justifiably upset’). Then there were the judgments of critics. She was compared, inevitably, with Barbara Pym and Beryl ...”

“... and ‘Masterman’ in his notebooks as potentially useful names when he found them in the Times. Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty ...”

“... party without quickly being disgusted by its humbug or convulsed by its absurdity. Jonathan Miller was surely wrong when he said to Thompson: ‘The idea that Peter had an anarchic, subversive view of society is complete nonsense. He was the most upstanding, traditional upholder of everything English and everything Establishment.’ My own experience ...”

“... culture he eviscerated in his fiction, and his letters become a catalogue of tiny hurts. To Ruth Miller, a former student, apropos a piece in the New York Times by Louis Simpson occasioned by Humboldt’s Gift: It was cheap, mean, it did me dirt … I don’t ask myself why the Times prints such miserable stuff, why I must be called an ingrate, a mental ...”

“... just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,’ one of her co-workers told Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The error was exposed in 2005 by the New York Times. The CIA completed its own review of the case in 2007. It turned out that Bikowsky didn’t have probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion – she had a hunch. ‘Available ...”

“... back on more private themes. Instead of his planned opera on the siege of Florence, we have Luisa Miller, Stiffelio and, later, La Traviata. When he returned to political subjects in Don Carlos, and in the revised version of Simone Boccanegra, it was in a much more subtle and complex fashion. The private Verdi, however, was no less controversial than the ...”

“... Roland Barthes on Balzac, Fredric Jameson on Conrad, Julia Kristeva on Mallarmé, Edward Said on Jane Austen, Paul de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so ...”

“... States of Mind, he adopted the classic essayist mode; his splendid occasional pieces on Jane Austen’s novels have some of the dry, delicate precision of their subject. It is part of his strength that this remarkable range is focused chronologically on the first half of the 19th century, so that his knowledge of its literature, for example, informs ...”

“... about to be displayed by Mallory’s urbane companion, the explosives expert Corporal John Miller (David Niven, thank goodness, when it was meant to be Kenneth More). Anna has somehow contrived to destroy or remove key elements of Miller’s kit, including all the fuses and timers. So it’s down to him to improvise ...”

“... Havel once, I seem to be the only playwright not personally acquainted with the deceased Arthur Miller and with some line on his life and work. Many of his plays I still haven’t seen, though years ago when I was reading everything I could get hold of on America and McCarthyism I came across Miller’s novel Focus, in ...”

“... grim comedy in its hero’s restless analyses of Maria’s conduct; like Winterbourne in ‘Daisy Miller’, he acts more like a detective than a lover. There is, moreover, a Keatonesque fallibility in his ponderously logical procedures. ‘I soon realised that my earlier conclusion had been naive: I had thought (correctly) that Maria need not necessarily ...”

“... of his co-ordinates are firmly fixed in the cultural map of ‘then’. He was born in the year of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network ...”

“... of, say, Macmillan to know that he sought solace in his private hours with the works of Livy and Jane Austen, what can one say about someone who, after spending much of her day ranting at her ministers, her civil servants and the Opposition about the evils of socialism, likes to relax, as her confidant, John Vaizey, put it, by ‘exciting herself with books ...”