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“... When Thomas Jefferson was introduced as the new American Ambassador to France in 1784, legend has it that the French minister asked if he was Benjamin Franklin’s replacement, and Jefferson replied that he was merely Franklin’s successor; no one could replace him. Whether or not the story is true, it conveys Franklin’s stature as the only serious rival to George Washington for the title of America’s greatest hero of the age ...”

“... acts, and whose character is shrouded by an almost painful formality? It’s no surprise that Joseph Ellis should now venture an answer to this question, having already produced biographies of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as well as a book about the 1790s, Founding Brothers, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Like many Americans, George ...”

“... Jefferson more than ever, not least to avoid charges that white America is in denial. Indeed, as Joseph Ellis notes, Jefferson has become ‘a contested prize in the ongoing culture wars’, a dead white male whose life and attitudes illuminate the dark side of the liberal tradition. A deep regard for ethical systems, notably the Epicurean and the ...”

“... the puddle of senile degeneration.’ ‘What is a pebble?’ is the opening sentence of Clarence Ellis’s book The Pebbles on the Beach, first published by Faber in 1954 and now reissued.* If ever there was a beach book, Ellis’s is it. He wrote it with the idea of encouraging beach visitors to collect pebbles, which had ...”

“... denounced as a bigoted member of the old order. RLT brooks no opposition and no questioning. (Joseph Schumpeter’s dictum still goes unheeded: ‘Obviously, we cannot say everywhere else is ideology; we alone stand on the rock of absolute truth.’) Washington looks at some typical RLT feminist arguments and concludes that they assume certain truths as ...”

“... the Victorian reading public, with its prurient speculations about the mysterious authors Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; meddling acquaintances whose reports fuelled those speculations; previous biographers who exploited those reports; close friends such as Ellen Nussey who defied Charlotte’s husband Arthur Nicholls and refused to burn the letters Charlotte ...”

“... consumed it with fervour; but the austere Harriet Martineau liked it too, as did General Gordon, Joseph Conrad and Edward VII. Its appeal spread far beyond British readers. R.K. Narayan dwells fondly on the ‘bitter tears’ he shed over East Lynne in his 1975 memoir, My Days: ‘Reading and rereading it always produced a lump in my throat, and that was the ...”

“... books were available to them, rather than too few? In his brief but authoritative introduction Joseph Brodsky says that Irina Ratushinskaya is ‘a poet with a voice of her own, piercing but devoid of hysteria’, who has been influenced but not taken over by the majestic voices of the Russian poets of the persecuted epoch – Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and ...”

“... was in his life: His volatility, like the ‘mad fear of being slighted and scorned’ felt by Joseph in Dangling Man, was an inheritance from his father and his family (‘a people of tantrums’) … It was a tendency exacerbated by early struggles against father and family, by the restrictions of his background, by prejudice, and by his immediate ...”

“... veins. McInerney (who was five years old in 1960) is the leading connoisseur with Bret Easton Ellis (who was not born in 1960) of a Nineties decadent chic. It’s that time of the century again, and McInerney’s style here and in his earlier bestseller Bright Lights, Big City is strikingly similar to 1890s Fin de Siècle, if one replaces absinthe with ...”

“... the specialist, wrote for circles of experts. The decline in reputation of amateurs such as Sir Joseph Banks and James Audubon, both of whom had counted themselves as naturalists, was largely the result of their failure to contribute to the growing body of specialist literature. Coleridge, a careful student of the Linnaean tradition, objected that the ...”

“... Sir Clough Williams-Ellis is best known nowadays as the owner-architect of Portmeirion, the hotel he built as a partly cliff-hanging, partly tree-nestled village on a North Wales coastal estuary, adding to it building by building across some fifty years. Always astonishing, some think beautiful, it enjoyed its greatest publicity as the setting for the cult TV series, The Prisoner ...”

“... for at least half a century. The best-known, or anyway the only one that ever gets mentioned, is Joseph Vance, the first of them, which was published in 1906; the best, or at any rate the most interesting, is Alice-for-Short, which followed, in spite of its great length, only a year later. De Morgan lived to be 88 and wrote seven novels, as well as two more ...”

“... and to dissect one’s private sensations was to miss the point’. Writers such as Havelock Ellis, who published an essay on his peyote experiences in the Lancet in 1897 (it’s likely that he also administered the substance to his friends W.B. Yeats and Arthur Symons), instead tended to focus on its visual effects. ...”

“... a horse-drawn harvester set off against a silver sea – over half a page. Clough Williams-Ellis stretched Tyneham’s view of Worbarrow Bay over the end-papers of his passionately-argued conservationist volume Britain and the Beast. There could scarcely have been a more evocative picture of an England that, in the Thirties, was endangered but still ...”