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“... substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John Halperin’s The Life of Jane Austen (1984), the work under review is in so many ways the best that it deserves to make its mark. The three authors, moreover, approach their subject (or subjects) from ...”

“... the Border hills near Beattock on the way to South Uist and Barra. At Oban I’ll rendezvous with David Paterson, a landscape photographer, who’s working with me on a book on the Highland Clearances. As I overtake a worn blue Audi estate, I look sideways and see Dave’s face and grizzled beard. We exchange incoherent signs, pull in a little later on the ...”

“... European union developing on the other side of the Channel would have been to deny, not perhaps Hugh Gaitskell’s tendentious ‘thousand years of history’, but the two thousand years since the Roman legions first set foot on British soil. Thus, for Jay, the Pro-Marketeers’ victory was an emotional affront as well as a political defeat. He cannot bring ...”

“... commonplace had found a champion who could wear its colours with all the ceremony of greatness.’ David Skal’s new biography of Stoker follows his 2004 study, Hollywood Gothic, which managed to take Dracula on page, stage and screen seriously, but not too seriously. It becomes clear reading the Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ how difficult it is to ...”

“... clear, compact, memorable, touching, and yet entirely decorous – with the added attraction, as Hugh Honour astutely points out in The Image of the Black, of hinting at conversion as well as emancipation. Indeed, Honour concludes that, for all the Society’s admirable intentions and great achievements – which he concedes with some reluctance – the very ...”

“... came naturally to Boswell, less naturally but effectively in the sentences of Adam Smith and David Hume, but at the cost of the reservation of the Scottish tongue for casual, domestic or low-life use. Yet, as Daiches reminds us, with an exceptionally happy choice of quotations, the literary endeavours of the upper class were accompanied by a genuine ...”

“... of Empire’, for instance) please her less than the ‘luminist’ paintings of Heade and Fitz Hugh Lane – those of ‘the still small voice’. She writes of the latter (they resemble the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich) that they ‘brought the 19th century as close as it could come to silence and the ...”

“... another. Alfred Borden, played by Christian Bale, wrecks a performance by Robert Angier, played by Hugh Jackman, with dire consequences: in the novel an abortion for Angier’s wife, in the movie the wife’s death. But this plausible bit of plotting very soon comes to look like an excuse. The two men are slugging it out in what they think of as something like ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... which we have imposed on the period, or by starting to explore its differential codings. Hugh Cunningham demonstrates very effectively that the identification of the Conservative Party with patriotism was never as unproblematic and as beneficial as many have assumed. Promoted by a faction, patriotism became associated with particular policies, and ...”

“... do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold Nicolson, O.S. Nock on Stanier, and Hugh Thomas on John Strachey. In such circumstances, where the great have already received the supreme accolade, there is little new to add. Much more interesting are the accounts of the otherwise unbiographied men and women of second rank, such as ...”

“... We want to believe that the animal had it coming. In 1823, the frontiersman and fur trapper Hugh Glass took part in an expedition up the Missouri River; while scouting for game, he surprised a grizzly bear with two cubs to protect. He got her in the end but suffered a severe mauling. Left for dead by his companions, he somehow made it back to Fort Kiowa ...”

“... David Womersley’s massive and elegant edition of Gibbon is the better timed because it comes a century after the edition scholars have been obliged to use as the nearest to a critical text. It was in 1896 that J.B. Bury brought out the first volume of his edition, which he reissued in 1909 and which until now has been considered standard ...”

“... students loved him. Modern critics – especially Scottish ones – have been less impressed. For David Daiches, Wilson is an ‘absolute impostor’ and a ‘windbag’; Andrew Noble tags him ‘the clay-footed prophet of the British-Scots middle-class’. In some respects, Wilson deserves all he gets. As an academic he was a charlatan; as a critic a coward ...”

“... Parliament. The argument against was rehearsed at the eleventh hour by Lord Chalfont, talking to David Dimbleby on BBC 1. Lord Chalfont was against the televising of the House of Lords because he suspected that it was just a stratagem on the part of the broadcasters so that they could force the door of the House of Commons, after which the House of ...”