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“... Viola’s question to the sea captain on being washed up on the shore after a shipwreck – ‘What country, friends, is this?’ – begins the second scene of Twelfth Night. His reply, ‘This is Illyria, lady,’ is our first introduction to the world in which the play will unfold. Many productions have begun here rather than with Orsino’s indolent ‘If music be the food of love, play on,’ inverting the opening scenes to inaugurate the action with the shock of Viola’s arrival ...”

“... semi-secularised version of the Nativity, according to the subtitle supplied to Benjamin Smith’s engraving for the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, ‘Nature is represented with her face unveiled to her favourite Child, who is placed between Joy and Sorrow. On the right of Nature are Love, Hatred & Jealousy; on her left hand, Anger, Envy & Fear.’ The ...”

“... about the place of friendship in life’? That was to the friend of his old age, Audrey Napier-Smith, and it is touching because he was old, she young: but he is also making up to her, being flirtatious, a little coy. As my quotation from Betjeman shows, emphasising friendship can be a form of love-making without sex: intended to reassure, to flatter ...”

“... quoting it verbatim or paraphrasing it closely, though ‘her’ Miss Bates or Mr Woodhouse or Emma have embalming-fluid in their literary veins); other characters derive weakly from other Austen novels (a brutal fop from Northanger Abbey, a kind-hearted mother from Sense and Sensibility) and one has strayed in wearing Mrs Jellyby’s clothes from Bleak ...”

“... theorist of economic recovery seems to be the early 19th-century French populariser of Adam Smith known to Marx as ‘the inane Jean-Baptiste Say … [who] refutes himself again’. The most successful recent guide to the economy – a work called Wealth and Poverty, described by the Republican Director of the Office of Management and Budget as ...”

“... it could have belonged to someone else with the same initials – the Stratford draper William Smith, for instance – but the possibility remains strong that it was Shakespeare’s. It is certainly a genuine ring of the period, and there are other pointers in its favour. The field where it was found, Mill Close, was on land that Shakespeare had owned: it ...”

“... Among the intellectual figures who have shaped the modern world Adam Smith stands out as someone who doesn’t frighten the laity, might be positively welcomed indeed by middle England. Should the neighbours catch a glimpse of the Wealth of Nations sitting on the bookshelf alongside Thatcher’s memoirs or the latest Delia Smith, there’s no risk of ostracism ...”

“... the cosmic wires have been crossed and could the spiritualist have been talking to Martin Seymour-Smith? For this massive biography of Hardy – or ‘Tom’, as Seymour-Smith chummily calls him – has the vehemence of divine revelation and the fervour of personal mission. ‘I wrote Hardy,’ the author explains in a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... us before we or the poem know it. A rather less dramatic example of the technique is the moment in Emma when Harriet Smith, disabused of her infatuation with Mr Elton, casts the pathetic relics of that love (a bit of ‘court plaister’ and the stub of a pencil) into the fire: ‘But, Harriet, is it necessary to burn the ...”

“... them all four times’ – and was ready to embark on another round. In their introduction to Emma in the Cambridge edition of the novels, Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan argue that Austen wrote for the rereader. In Emma she deliberately sacrificed ‘readability’ for the sake of a novel that ‘demanded repeated ...”

“... your unflattering portrayal, or they’ll be too embarrassed to own up to it. In the words of Lee Smith, the author of Fair and Tender Ladies and, most recently, The Last Girls: ‘It’s easy to disguise them enough for the purposes of putting them in a novel – just add a moustache, or change their sex or move them to Arizona . . . They’ll never ...”

“... search function directs you first to ‘Bradley, Katharine Harris’ and then to ‘Cooper, Edith Emma’. Click on the second name, however, and you aren’t taken to a biography of Cooper but back to her aunt, Bradley. These convoluted preliminaries seem appropriate for two women whose identities were entangled in various forms of ...”

“... Kaminsky’s writing: ‘029: Drone of a single bee’. Similarly obsessive but much wittier is Emma McNally’s The River that Flows Nowhere, Like a Sea, a gigantic pencil-drawn chart of unlabelled infographics and interconnections, concentric circles, seething sub and super-strata, suggestive of geology and topography and the tides, scrunched up in the ...”

“... suitable for all the contradictory fantasies and hallucinations that the author wishes to convey. Emma Tennant’s Wild Nights is the most ambitious and the most exciting of these four novels. It gives us reality through the five senses of a child narrator, and is not so much fantasy as a witch’s eye view of the world. ‘I waited for the night journey over ...”