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“... from the novels, restricted to the work of seven novelists: Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott, Clara Reeve and Frances Burney. (There are occasional references to other writers, such as Jane Austen.) A segment on, for instance, ‘Daughters’ will discuss daughters and ...”

“... advocating the benefits of fresh air, cured Macaulay.According to a gossipy neighbour, the writer Sarah Scott, Graham had ‘etherised and electrified her, till he has made her electric’ – possibly a euphemism for Macaulay’s new-found notoriety. In 1778 the widowed 47-year-old married Graham’s 21-year-old younger brother, William – a purported ...”

“... attributed to those in the ‘middling’ station. They look like the kind of women the novelist Sarah Scott would describe as not perhaps endowed with the musical accomplishments of more elevated ladies, but capable of ‘making their own gowns, stays, caps, &c’, mending their own linen, making ‘pastry, cakes, jellies, sweet-meats’ and excelling ...”

“... Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, Horace Walpole ... twenty, plus the recognised fathers of the novel ... Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence [sic] Sterne; generosity indeed to double the number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates ...”

“... familiar from Michael Hurd’s biography, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978). The first is Marion Scott, a friend from Gurney’s Royal College days. She would loom large in any account, as the person who collated Gurney’s scattered manuscripts and intervened with his doctors to help him write. Edric’s plausible if somewhat uninspired take on her is as ...”

“... and – heaven preserve us – ‘pinkly’.When the nice person at HarperCollins tried to send me Sarah Ferguson’s novel as a PDF, she warned that it might go straight to junk. I’m not sure if that’s reverse publicity-think, but, in the end, even my junk wouldn’t take it. I eventually scored a hard copy and went to sit down with it in Kensington ...”

“... The most remarkable aspect of the Scott Report is its simplicity. The famous length and the differing interpretations to which it has been subjected since its publication suggest a learned and complex treatise full of ambiguity and complex allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul ...”

“... and making her into a monster, or William Hazlitt, who in 1822-3 imagined a dialogue with the girl Sarah Walker which is always neurotically monologue. Sarah, daughter of Hazlitt’s London landlord, and heroine of his autobiographical letter-novel the Liber Amoris, acts the part of goddess and slut in Hazlitt’s fevered ...”

“... about real life. Private and public experiences merged in the process: male heroes like Captain Scott of The Birthday Boys tended to be modelled on her father. Imagination and an awareness of her own mortality allowed her to understand what it must have been like to stand on the deck of the Titanic, waiting for it to sink. Master Georgie has been described ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of women at the end of the 19th century. Gissing’s The Odd Women is one of them. Another is Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book, published in 1897. One would expect the man’s treatment of the subject to differ from the woman’s, but though the two books are as dissimilar as they could be, the difference has little to do with gender. From the point of view ...”

“... when you’re young. ‘I want to be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived,’ Scott Fitzgerald said to his friend Edmund Wilson when they were just out of college, ‘don’t you?’ Wilson was the son of a lawyer, a bit chilly, a prodigious reader steeped in Plato and Dante. He thought Fitzgerald’s remark foolish – just what you might ...”

“... Prufrock volume can now be seen ‘to stain the whole sea’ of modern verse. His advocacy of Scott Fitzgerald began with, or endured through, the appalling This Side of Paradise to the triumph of Gatsby. Stevens, Cummings, Pound, Crane, Dos Passos: their merits and possibilities of development were noted at an early stage in their careers. For two ...”

“... When Habiba withdrew from him, Onyango turned to other women, including the one who became ‘Mama Sarah’, a surrogate grandmother to the president. He also took to beating Habiba. One night, after he nearly killed her, she fled to her family in Kolonde. Barack and his sister were heartbroken. They walked 100 miles to try to get her back. She refused. The ...”

“... For Frank, lifestyle protest is not an option. His cellmate at work lives what appears to be an F. Scott Fitzgerald life, dissipated but attractive, sinking endless martinis with his heiress wife and friends just in from the Bahamas. Then Frank goes to this man’s home and sees the truth: the wife is ‘a sodden, ageing woman with lips forever painted in the ...”