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“... From one point of view, Thomas Crow’s remarkable pair of books, Painters and Public Life in 18th-Century Paris (1985) and Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (1995), can be described as a history of the decline and fall, and amazing final reprieve, of history-painting in France. Long cherished by the Academy of Painting and Sculpture as the highest and ‘noblest’ genre and the summit of a painter’s ambition, by the middle of the 18th century the theme of critics and philosophers was that, in the France of Louis XV, history-painting was simply impossible ...”

“... When Sarah Orne Jewett sent her friend Henry James a copy of her latest work, a historical novel entitled The Tory Lover, he told her it would take a very long letter to ‘disembroil the tangle’ of how much he appreciated the gift of this ‘ingenious exercise’ of hers, and how little he was in sympathy with historical novels. He begged her to come back to the modern age and ‘the dear country of The Pointed Firs’, to ‘the present-intimate, that ‘throbbed responsive’ and was so much missing her ...”

“... I hate voyages and explorers,’ Lévi-Strauss writes in his Tristes Tropiques (1955). So what is he doing, he asks himself, in producing this account of his expeditions? Must I relate so many insipid details and insignificant occurrences? Adventure has no place in the ethnographic profession: it is merely a form of servitude, it burdens effective work with the weight of weeks or months lost in travelling; idle hours in which informants disappear; hunger, fatigue, sometimes illness; and always those thousand duties which consume the days in pure loss and reduce the dangerous life in the virgin forest to an imitation of military service ...”

“... enter the doctor’s house, he merely ‘slunk into the garden and flattened my face against the pane of the living-room window’. Welch was very fortunate in his literary career. He received what he called a ‘plum, jewel, diadem knock-out’ letter of encouragement about Maiden Voyage from Edith Sitwell, and a ‘fine letter’ from E.M. Forster, ‘full ...”

“... a dragon’s’ in every direction. ‘The immediate result... was that most of the white-painted pine wall-panelling in the morning-room and drawing-room cracked clean down the middle. Tortoise-shell and ivory inlay in cabinets began to buckle. Worst of all was that, unless you leant over the banisters and gazed down at the grille, or stood right on top of ...”

“... comfort, but with aristocratic luxury. ‘He sat almost in rags and groaned with the fear that his pen would not be able to provide for his children and grandchildren great mansions to withstand the snow, elaborately ornamented sleighs, blood horses, innumerable retainers and halls opening out, the one into the other, beyond the eyesight.’ Ford has very ...”

“... particular pathos which attached to it, was, of course, a favourite of Balzac’s (see Le Cousin Pons, Le Curé de Tours and Le Père Goriot), and it was also central to Henry James (think of ‘Daisy Miller’ and The Wings of the Dove), as it was to Ford. The other strand of French tradition comes from Flaubert, and the important point about this ...”

“... Iris Origo, who died in 1988 at the age of 86, was a highly esteemed biographer and autobiographer, author of The Last Attachment (1949), about Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, his last mistress; The Merchant of Prato (1957), about a 14th-century Tuscan merchant and banker, and other Italy-oriented works. Her father, Bayard Cutting, came from an exceedingly rich New England family, with a fortune derived from the railroads and land development; her mother, Sybil, was daughter of Lord Desart, an Irish peer ...”

“... The problem for social prophets, it would seem, lies not in getting the future right, which appears not to be too difficult, but in predicting the response which the future will command. ‘A thousand men at a thousand glowing desks, a busy specialist press, will be perpetually sifting, criticising, condensing, and clearing the ground for further speculation ...”

“... Brian Finney speaks of the study of autobiography as a ‘yawning gap’ in British scholarship. It is also, to judge from myself, a yawning gap in one’s own thoughts, which this is a good moment to try to fill. Finney has his own perspective, which is much concerned, first, with the ‘truth’ factor and attendant perceptual problems; secondly with autobiography as psychotherapy; and thirdly with the (large) function assigned to the reader by an autobiography ...”

“... stage. The regulars were expected to contribute literary offerings, and Graffigny, taking to the pen for the first time, submitted a melancholy story entitled ‘La Nouvelle Espagnole’. The general opinion was that it was very bad, the Academician Duclos saying he wished to be spared so much local colour: such things were better conveyed by what characters ...”

“... down Charing Cross Road, in a white cashmere jacket with matching plus-fours and knee-length pink stockings, a marmoset perching on his shoulder. By the 1930s he was entertaining in Southend pubs in exchange for a drink or small change, his ravaged features plastered over with make-up, and on his shoulder, this time, a pet chicken. He gassed himself in ...”

“... It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces ...”

“... It was the foible of the heroes of Italo Svevo’s novels to wake up each morning believing that, through their own striving, some splendid vita nuova might have begun and they might at last have become a quite different person; and it was the theme of their cheerfully Schopenhauerian creator that this was the most unchanging thing about them. (As it was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D ...”

“... According to Stevenson’s wishes, his letters were first presented to the public by his friend, the art historian Sidney Colvin. Colvin, described by Stevenson as a ‘difficult, shut up, noble fellow’, did the job reasonably conscientiously. He was, however, an arch-bowdleriser, using, as he said, ‘the editorial privilege of omission without scruple where I thought it desirable’ and painstakingly altering the novelist’s ‘bloody’ to ‘beastly’, his ‘constipation’ to ‘indigestion’ and his ‘God grant’ to ‘I only hope ...”