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“... themselves. The depictions of the royal women of Amarna were conceptual rather than realistic, Dorothea Arnold explains, quoting Edna Russmann, who dismisses the search by other scholars for a pathological explanation of the egg-headed princesses. Such views are, she says, based on false premises. ‘They arise from modern perceptions and ...”

“... that it was his wife who had failed him, because of the ‘peculiarity of her character’. Gaynor Arnold’s first novel, Girl in a Blue Dress, long-listed for the Booker Prize, is a retelling of the Dickens marriage, and although the names have been changed (the great man is now called ‘Alfred Gibson’), in an afterword ...”

“... Towards the end of Middlemarch, Dorothea spends a mostly sleepless night following a dream-ending encounter the day before. At dawn, she goes to her window: She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog ...”

“... in spirit to those worn by the naked feet of pilgrims into the marble steps of a shrine.’ Thus Arnold Bennett described the dresser in the kitchen presided over by the heroine of Anna of the Five Towns. For Anna herself, this is merely ‘the dresser’. She has no consciousness of its ‘simple and dignified’ design, nor of its ‘ripe tone’, and she ...”

“... that of Wordsworth and, to a far greater extent, Coleridge? His debts to Bentham and Mill, even to Arnold, were largely those of a debater who picks up whatever may usefully be gleaned from the other side of a discussion which, in Coleridge on the Imagination, he deliberately took back to first principles. The man who, at the onset of his literary career, had ...”

“... that Meredith wrote is not merely faulty but downright bad.’ On Meredith’s centenary in 1928, Arnold Bennett summarised the problem: ‘He wanders vaguely around. He gets lost. Even when going straight he often goes too slowly. So that the reader says impatiently to himself: “Yes. This is brilliant and sound stuff, but it irritates me, and I almost wish ...”

“... at Tarrytown and hanged at Tappan for his supposedly traitorous collaboration with Benedict Arnold. André was an attractive felon: even Americans called him ‘beautiful’, ‘manly’ and ‘noble’, and his charmed memory inspired commemorative sites associated with the last ten days of his life. A window he might have looked through in West ...”

“... himself in the book. Virginia Woolf described the Modernist experiment as an attempt to improve on Arnold Bennett and his contemporaries, who held forth in theory about the importance of character but failed miserably in practice. The Marxist and Freudian explanations of the demise of characterisation in modern writing are surely commonplace by now – but ...”

“... early self-punitive Evangelicism to consort with fashionable Coventry freethinkers. For Matthew Arnold, it is culture which will inherit the ideological role of religion in sustaining a corporate faith; but Arnold’s ‘culture’ is altogether too lofty and nebulous an idea for the task in hand, too much on the side of ...”

“... of his message: ‘We are struggling with the waves of doubt – storm-tost and ready to sink,’ Dorothea Beale said at a Society meeting in 1882, going on, as though unwittingly describing a Punch cartoon: ‘And as we look at him, we see him with a smile on his face, calmly floating, his head above the waves, his body supported therein.’ (The paper ...”

“... as The Cheery Orchard.30 September. Read The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero Mostel by Arnold Wesker, an account of his attempts to get his play, Shylock, produced and how it flopped on Broadway. Much of it I find sympathetic, though the only lesson I can draw from it is that playwright and director should never correspond. The text is full of ...”