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“... the expense of food quality. They sell squidgy bread. And they call their staff ‘colleagues’. Felicity Lawrence’s dislike of contemporary food production methods and systems is equally strong. She disapproves of broiler chickens. The use of migrant seasonal labour and gangmasters affronts her. Ready meals are a bad thing. Just-in-time delivery to ...”

“... if only because they simply cannot go on. We are now entering a period of rapid transition’ (Felicity Lawrence, Eat Your Heart Out, 2008). ‘We depend just as much on our gas-guzzling, chilled plug-in, “just-in-time” food deliveries as ancient Romans did on foreign conquests, shipping and slaves – and our food system is no more ...”

“... they witness will come as little surprise to anyone who has read Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Felicity Lawrence, Eric Schlosser or any of the previous exposés of factory-farmed meat, but they make grim and startling reading even so. If you can get beyond the title, the great virtues of Farmageddon are its global reach and eyewitness accounts of the ...”

“... with a dust-pan and brush, ‘sweeping up [a visitor’s] footmarks’ – a touch of Dickensian felicity evoking that roughly contemporary Victorian household, the Veneerings, and suggesting what a price could be exacted in emotional and spiritual terms for the social reassurance of a flawless surface. His travels as a young man, to Canada, to Russia, to ...”

“... No work of Butts is quite the equal of Armed with Madness. Her next novel, The Death of Felicity Taverner, is very distinguished, and contains a probing exploration of anti-semitism. But it is already turning back towards a more conventional realism. The two historical fictions which followed, a life of Alexander the Great called The Macedonian ...”

“... we are given instances of those who supported the role of violence, Carlyle, Ruskin and T.E. Lawrence – hardly a representative sample and not strictly contemporary. One absent theme, striking to those aware of modern historiography, is the experience of women. In a long exposition of the development of socialism, which carries an updating of ...”

“... his power to do so felt – and he remains always bored. There is a remarkable coincidence with Lawrence when George Eliot refers to Grandcourt as a ‘handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind’. I am thinking of the passage in The Crown (V) where Lawrence takes the snake and the ...”

“... us read the poems more intelligently, with greater appreciation of their almost invariable verbal felicity. To his poetic coevals Jarrell was the voice of sanity, somebody able to bring their fancies down to earth because his own were so firmly placed on the ground. He was a corrective to excesses in other ways, drinking little, uneasy at parties, disliking ...”

“... during the darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as ...”

“... persons. Brophy tends to whip them up into a nice homogeneous blend. She is far too acquiescent in Lawrence Stone’s view of ‘companionate marriage’ and spends time working out whether some woman had a ‘really happy marriage’ or not – although the difficulties of figuring out, even among one’s contemporaries, whether a marriage is ‘happy’ are ...”

“... but quite delicious. Anybody interested in the question of literary style – or the history of felicity – will understand why it used sometimes to be said that the right had the best jokes. They did have the best jokes, if one understands a joke to be a remark that succeeds at someone else’s expense, or at the general expense of earnestness, of which ...”

“... one that implies that ‘her writing has sophistication – that somehow unfortunate state of felicity in whose toils most of us wallow from time to time even as we struggle to cast them off.’ Indeed, Quinn’s new edition compels us to go a step further, to realise that another problematic part of Bishop’s appeal involves the contrast between the ...”