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“... Hary’s Wallace; and in the brassy Reformation of John Knox it blares even in the sophisticated George Buchanan’s over-the-top ‘Elegy for Jean Calvin’. The volume remains high in some of Robert Fergusson’s sophistic-performative street-talk, Burns’s on-off, rip-roaring ‘Tam o’Shanter’, MacDiarmid’s last trump blawing ...”

“... authority and why. Objectivity is not just a word of many meanings; it is also a fighting word. George Levine’s study of objectivity in Victorian science and literature is an eirenic as well as an interdisciplinary undertaking. It is an attempt, as earnest and highminded as the Victorians he writes about, to show how science and literature shared an ethos ...”

“... period. Acknowledgment is generously offered to one of the author’s history teachers, Professor Walter Ullman of Cambridge, ‘who inspired in me a fascination for past perceptions of society’. Yet no course of lectures on Medieval political theory and the heterodox role of Marsilius of Padua could have produced writing of this kind. I am tempted to ...”

“... and explicatory methods necessary to do battle with those who valued Tennyson and Swinburne and Walter de la Mare. He was amusing and frequently defamatory about his antagonists. ‘Eustace Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard, gentlemen. The master of Jesus. He goes in for Morris dancing, you know. I’ve seen him with bells on his legs.’ ‘William ...”

“... more precise theory and practice of language than the on-going bustle of narrative will allow for. George Meredith, to take a good example, plays havoc with the expected sequence of events, expanding and contracting particular elements of the plot so that we can feel the sinews of narrative creaking and cracking under the strain. Then he turns round and ...”

“... William Gell published the two handsome volumes of his Pompeiana. He guided round the sites Sir Walter Scott, then nearing the end of his life. Like Shelley, Scott was less moved by the remains than by the thought of the destruction of the cities, and repeatedly exclaimed: ‘The City of the Dead!’ Meanwhile, excavation continued to be desultory and ...”

“... of the common sense. In July 1866, for example, in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, one George Dedlow told how he had lost all his limbs in the Civil War and been consigned to Stump Hospital, Philadelphia. He was in consequence ‘not a happy fraction of a man’: reduced, he said, to a sort of larval state, but tormented by phantom pains at all ...”

“... rackety and sometimes rickety lines. Frequently it is merely chopped prose. In a vignette of Walter Benjamin we find this: ‘after he fled Berlin/the Bibliothèque Nationale/was the only place/he allowed himself to feel at home in./It couldn’t be a sanctuary/for it gave him only/a brief passing illusion/of safety that ended/with the German ...”

“... Katie Roiphe was writing a piece about it for Harper’s. Twenty years ago, when I worked for George magazine, I’d commissioned Roiphe to write about the report written by Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor who had presided over the investigations into what had gone on in the Clinton White House – Lewinsky, Whitewater, Travelgate etc. Moira ...”

“... George Santayana made himself anything but plain in his writings. Even when he was memorably, aphoristically direct, he toyed with the contrary, the piquing, the enigmatic, the confounding, and got into the habit of regarding even his own obscurity as an emblem of his integrity, as his boast. He meant it to be impossible to lay a glove on him ...”

“... from essayist. This is the manner to which James in turn was reacting when he faulted George Eliot’s Romola for an ‘excess of analysis … too much reflection (all certainly of a highly imaginative sort) and too little creation’. This mode brings you Tolstoy’s historiography, or the relentless self-commentary of certain ...”

“... by phrases like ‘as it transpired’, ‘if you take my meaning’ and ‘if you follow me, Walter,’ little verbal tugs intended to make sure her audience is still at her heels, following her down the track of some interminable, over-detailed and ultimately inconsequential narrative. Dad suffers this tedious saga with as good grace as he can ...”

“... the first attempt, he lets it alone. The poem seems to allude to the swans in the second stanza of Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Old Summerhouse’, also in the Faber book: Fall – fall: dark, garrulous rumour, Until I could listen no more. Could listen no more – for beauty with sorrow Is a burden hard to be borne; The evening light on the foam, and the ...”

“... questioned whether the use of the drug was compatible with the Hippocratic oath, or whether, as George Bernard Shaw charged, it was turning them into ‘licensed murderers’. It was in the United States, where addiction was seen as peculiarly un-American – resulting in ‘a life of weakness, decadence and, above all, social uselessness’ – that the ...”

“... known as ‘Plorn’, stayed on at Gad’s Hill. News of the others – Charley at Baring’s, Walter out in India, Frank trying to learn German in Hamburg, Sydney being accepted for the Navy, Alfred and Henry at various schools – is relayed in a style sometimes more cheery than convincing. Dickens’s treatment of his boys has been thought ...”