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“... thin legs’, already ‘halfway to being a dim English spinster’. Soignée Prudence Bates in Jane and Prudence shudders at the messiness of her friend Jane’s family life, returning with relief to her independent life and her smart London flat, though its uncomfortable Regency furniture puts off a potential ...”

“... says little about literature, except in connection with Matthew Arnold’s controversy with F.W. Newman over Homer, and not much about aesthetics in general. But he remarks that, in the study of Greek sculpture, Victorian Classicists, down to the brothers Gardner, still active in the Thirties of this century, continued to defend the aesthetics of ...”

“... life, even though some of his sallies made her uncomfortable. The letters to his favourite sister, Jane, constantly invoke, and try against the odds to recreate, the intense intimacy they had shared in childhood, and include an extraordinarily revealing strangulated cry of pain at the news of her engagement. Hardly less intriguing are the numerous letters to ...”

“... widely read. In his own day Crabbe was a famous and distinguished author – the favourite of both Jane Austen and Byron. And while he had two distinct and distinctly successful careers, until the last two decades of his long life he was continually beset with disaster and the threat of disaster. The first of his two careers happened in the 1780s, before the ...”

“... the present day, each one made to stand for a particular type of donnish character: John Henry Newman (‘The Charismatic Don’); Maurice Bowra (‘The Don as Wit’); George Rylands (‘The Don as Performer’); John Sparrow (‘The Don as Dilettante’); Isaiah Berlin (‘The Don as Magus’). The scheme falters somewhat when we reach the Don as ...”

“... the entire revision, which is to centre the point of view within his central character, pursuing Newman’s own responses – a process which Horne believes offers ‘an increase in ironic consciousness of relation’. But the reader may object that these niceties slow the narrative to little purpose, that Newman is not ...”

“... involved, a rank shift had occurred in certain hearts and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine was ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1849, Arthur Hugh Clough went to dinner with the writer Jane Octavia Brookfield. ‘I tried to talk with him, but he has the most peculiar manner I almost ever saw,’ she wrote to Thackeray the following day. ‘Mr Clough sat at the foot of my sofa with this keen expression of investigation, which I determined not to mind, & only thought him un-understandable ...”

“... other times we encounter outright lies or convenient omissions. Matthew skipped out on his sister Jane’s wedding to William Forster of the landmark Education Act. Forster’s personal style was flat, but Matthew was also jealous of his political success. Still, he did not give his sister away – in the Lake Country ‘with the great fells standing ...”

“... while his long-suffering wife, Dorothy (they were married for 57 years), stayed at home. When Jane Russell, a family friend, and his co-star on two films including Macao – the film which prompted Howard Hughes to write a multi-page memo on the subject of her breasts – was asked to choose her favourite Mitchum film, she said: ‘I just like ...”

“... portrait of such informal ravishing loveliness one felt one’s own complex sort of gratitude. (Jane Freilicher’s gorgeous gouaches come to mind.) Beauty is Truth. But she seemed not to realise when she had produced a winner. Her pictures hang on the walls indiscriminately; the stunning ones mixed in with a lot of mermaids, dreamy girls in ...”