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“... pen names and spoof attributions figure centrally in the genre’s history, from Scott, to George Eliot, to Kilgore Trout. According to the massive, nine-volume Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature there are, largely speaking, only three reasons for masked authorship, all prudential: ‘Generally the motive is some form of ...”

“... please’, ‘Yoo hoo’), daft, slightly old-fashioned exclamations (‘by Gosh’, ‘by George’, ‘by Golly’) and corny ones (‘Heck’, ‘Darn!’, ‘nifty’, ‘critter’, ‘dangblasted’). This fits in well with the book’s obsessive concern with past fashions, games that are no longer played, flowers that are no longer worn, and ...”

“... thought to have provoked lifelong neurosis about sex. The Companion does not record that George Meredith was instrumental in getting The Story of an African Farm published (poor old Meredith also loses his credit for helping Ouida and Marie Corelli into print). In her later career in England, the Companion portrays Schreiner’s relationships with ...”

“... Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and ...”

“... nightmare for the people’. The BSE crisis has been Little Englandism’s greatest moment. On St George’s Day, the editorial started on page one and took up a complete inside page, with the headline ‘Beware the EU dragon.’ If Europe doesn’t want our beef, the Sun said, then fair enough: ‘we don’t particularly want its garlic, horsemeat or ...”

“... the affair with Charles resumed, she opened her own discreet channels of communication. Stuart Higgins, a royal reporter for the Sun who had covered the West Country for the paper since 1979, became a regular contact. Camilla did not call him, but if he called her she would confirm or deny what he had heard elsewhere about Charles and Diana and add a few ...”

“... was the first child and eldest daughter of the future fifth earl of Leicester, later an equerry to George VI, and his wife, Elizabeth Yorke, daughter of the eighth earl of Hardwicke. The first chapter of Lady in Waiting, covering her ‘idyllic’ early childhood, in which the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret were often brought over to play, is entitled ...”

“... series of multi-media ‘experiences’ complete with wax figures, stroboscopic lighting and Jack Higgins voiceover. In the middle of this crass make-believe is Mière’s homemade display: faded photos of people with Jersey names and Forties hairdos, whose quirky captions contain sentiments that are either tender or bitter, but are above all ...”

“... Falkland’. 23 January (?) 1765: Byron takes formal possession of all the islands in the name of George III. On his voyage no settlement was left behind, though the surgeon of the Tamar planted a garden ‘with many esculent vegetables... for the benefit of those who hereafter come to this place’. 20 July 1765: decision made to send out another expedition ...”

“... in the 1930s. He started joking with a lighter touch about his gloomy ways (one letter to Aidan Higgins ends: ‘With which rays of sunshine I am/Yours sincerely …’), and his self-deprecation became a powerful sort of charm. ‘Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me,’ he wrote to Alan Schneider in 1956, ‘in fact I feel ...”

“... pardons the renegade. In 2003 Lenny Bruce received a posthumous pardon for his conviction from George Pataki, then governor of New York. And in 2005 the Library of America started publishing Roth’s work in a uniform edition. It wasn’t the first time a living author’s work had been honoured in this way: Eudora Welty and Saul Bellow went before ...”