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“... the conqueror, who would show himself conscious of his cultural calling in Europe.’ Eliza Marian Butler started studying the Nazis’ designs for Europe in 1933. Born in Lancashire in 1885 and educated extensively on the Continent, she had watched Kaiser Wilhelm inspect his troops, witnessed German violence close-up as a nurse in the First World War, and ...”

“... a novel reader, but there was modesty in the disclaimer. He listed Jane Austen, Proust and Samuel Butler as the three authors who had helped him most, adding that Butler ‘did more than either of the other two to help me look at life the way I do’. He named Dante, Gibbon and Tolstoy the greatest of writers and repeatedly ...”

“... Samuel Butler might be seen as one of those liberators who escort readers and admirers into a new airy sort of cell, and turn the key with an air of bestowing on them perfect freedom and emancipation of mind. So effective a freedom fighter was he, at least on one front, that his message and his books may now seem not much more than literary curiosities ...”

“... enough for the five most changeable speakers in his table, Marianne Dashwood, Mr Knightley, Fanny, Emma and Henry Crawford, not so well for the next best learners, Mrs Norris and Mrs Bennet. Once again, other authors fail to match Austen’s remarkable diversity. Forster’s Margaret Schlegel ‘develops’ considerably more than other figures in her ...”

“... the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of the public libraries. His name is Eamonn Butler and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are from that stable, he’s pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who’s an ...”

“... these are as packed with ideas and argumentative passages as the ‘prig novels’ of Samuel Butler and H.G. Wells. Although Byatt herself attended Cambridge, there is a feeling of thesis-illustration and slightly strained invention in Frederica’s adventures there. One sees it in the names of the luminaries who gather around her, names such as Raphael ...”

“... It is true that Gide and Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though ...”

“... without the Nonconformist conscience and the nascent women’s movement. From 1869, Josephine Butler and the Repeal Association battled against the British Act until, in 1883, they secured its suspension, and, in 1886, its abolition. Successful in Britain, one section of the reform movement turned its attention to India. It was not enough for the ...”

“... came to his house for the weekend, he quite shattered her by simply refusing to allow her in. The butler, taking pity on her, let her in after all, only (according to Herbert’s highly-coloured story) to find her later in the cellar, eating coal. What were the circumstances causing a common condition to be acted out on such a spectacular scale? Two obvious ...”

“... Charles Ryder to visit his old nanny at Brideshead, where the two climbed ‘uncarpeted, scrubbed elm stairs, followed more passages, covered with linoleum ... up a final staircase, gated at the head. Here were the nurseries.’ The nurseries! The grand calm of that plural has a magniloquence all the more comic for sounding so self-assured. Here is the old ...”

“... and Oscar Browning, but solid, sober headmasters in the High Victorian style, such as Montagu Butler and J.E.C. Welldon at Harrow, afforced by Kennedy at Shrewsbury, Farrar at Marlborough, and Young at Sherborne. Lubenow is interested in a whole raft of different topics, and the only complaint one can decently level at The Cambridge Apostles is that it ...”

“... Like all his best work, Loving shows his extraordinary gift for combining the two. When Raunce the butler hears the gramophone playing in the ballroom which the servant girls Edith and Kate are supposed to air once a week, he is at first irritated: ‘The little bitches I’ll show ‘em,’ he said and suddenly opened.   They were wheeling wheeling in ...”

“... 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 time; in ...”

“... not going to Eton than a servant not dropping an “h”’. One enjoys the odd Thackerayan butler announcing that ‘lunching was served’, but what is odd in a novel whose protagonist is racked by a social conscience, and longs to go ‘into one of those East End parishes and start a place something on the lines of Toynbee Hall’ is the mocking ...”

“... books are relaxed about discussing similarly dubious subjects, such as ‘natural children’ (Emma is unimaginable without one such product of ‘vice’, Harriet Smith). Either way, Austen must have been aware of the possibility she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became ...”