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“... Marilyn Butler​ , whose Peacock Displayed was published in 1979, wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend and patron, who joked in 1820 about ‘the Pavonian Psyche’ (pavo: peacock), as though Peacock himself had the kind of name that he specialised in giving to his characters ...”

“... Published two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate ...”

“... people at the table – a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heart pounded with love, perhaps, or rage, or fear when our writer shuffled in from his study.There is a freshness to her language that comes from a time when taking the quiet person’s perspective was still controversial; taking the wife’s point of view – or the ...”

“... in a fundamentally likeable way. Quite when the idea emerges Harris doesn’t say, but by the time Thomas LovePeacock was describing a group of ill-assorted travelling companions easing reluctantly into conversation in Headlong Hall, he was sure of raising a smile by making the topic on which they eventually settle ...”

“... The absurdity of the Gothick was captured and its pretensions crisply punctured by Jane Austen and Thomas LovePeacock, but reality was often stranger than anything that even the most fetid literary imagination could come up with. Nothing could have been odder, more menacing or even more prophetic – when viewed with ...”

“... Mary had lost a lot of the revolutionary passion she shared with him in that frantic, whispered love affair in the Charterhouse Gardens or over Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave in St Pancras churchyard. Her reforming zeal shines out brightly from Frankenstein – though her doubts and worries are clear too. (What happens, she wondered, when brilliant young ...”

“... figure as any in this collection.’ Knight went about wholeheartedly preaching the cause of free love and paganism, to which he adhered as a matter of practice as well as of theory. He had a reputation as a debauchee in youth, and remained in the habit of keeping a mistress. He admired the celebrated beauties Lady Hamilton and Lady Oxford, and in 1801 was ...”

“... he was 21, his father decamped to South Africa). His marriage to Mary Ellen Nicolls, daughter of Thomas LovePeacock, one of his writer heroes, ended in 1857 after she absconded with the painter Henry Wallis. Meredith took sole custody of their four-year-old son, Arthur; Mary Ellen died in 1861. There are photographs ...”

“... 1798, Pitt introduced income tax. This was not a strikingly original conception. Two years earlier Thomas LovePeacock, aged 11, had written that while he did not wish ‘Mr Pitt’s removal from his exalted station’, he thought Pitt ‘would have acted more in conformity with the wishes of the People had he taxed ...”

“... run over by Stephenson’s Rocket at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830. Thomas LovePeacock, who found a pleasant berth at the India Board after writing Nightmare Abbey, began to investigate the possibilities of navigating the Euphrates from the Gulf to northern Syria – the India mail ...”

“... England,’ he said, ‘justice is open to all, like the Ritz.’ The Early Victorian poet Thomas LovePeacock had noted the unequal impact of the Sunday observance laws: The poor man’s sins are glaring; In the face of ghostly warning He is caught in the fact Of an overt act – Buying greens on a Sunday ...”

“... it only arose from a misunderstanding of what he meant by sympathy, on the one hand, and self-love, on the other. But still, the problematists weren’t wrong that some central elements of Smith’s mind pointed in strikingly different directions, so that, say, sentimentalist and utilitarian admirers could equally find encouragement for their positions ...”

“... constituencies, fathom the reality behind the polemics of Cobbett and the satire of Dickens and Thomas LovePeacock. These six volumes are crammed with comédie humaine and the parliamentary puppetry that seems, as Blake said, something other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis ...”

“... to plot but attach themselves to Robin to give us a Venn diagram of the Robin Hood we now know and love: ‘noble, handsome, gentlemanly, rashly brave, violent in the service of good, blandly representative of national and even international liberalism, devoted in a slightly distant way to his lady, leader of a loyal band of ready and lower-class fighters who ...”

“... Ulysses S. Grant, for Logan Pearsall Smith, Frederick Prokosch, Edith Wharton, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas LovePeacock and Henry Miller: ‘If he often sounded like the village idiot, that was because, like Whitman, he was the rest of the village as well.’ But alongside the blessings, kicks and curses is a running ...”