Before parody

“Know, prince, that when Alphonso set sail for the Holy Land--Is this a season for explanations? cried Theodore. Father, come and unite me to the princess: she shall be mine--in every other thing I will dutifully obey you. My life! my adored Matilda! continued Theodore, rushing back into the inner chamber, will you not be mine? will you not bless your--Isabella made signs to be silent, apprehending the princess was near her end. What, is she dead? cried Theodore: is it possible? The violence of his exclamations brought Matilda to herself. Lifting up her eyes she looked round for her mother--Life of my soul! I am here, cried Hippolita: think not I will quit thee!--Oh! You are too good, said Matilda--but weep not for me, my mother!” – Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

Much as English has changed since the 18th century, I’m sure “you are too good” has always sounded like a response to being offered a slice of cake.

[The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, Thomas Lowndes, 1765. Startlingly influential gothic story – and about the worst-written “classic” novel I’ve read, not excluding Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii. It is short, however, and some of the jokes may be intentional.]

Authenticity?

"Julia Reed saw it as one of her functions to provide me with authentic American experiences. On one memorable evening in New York she arrived at my apartment in a chauffeur-driven limousine with a bottle of whiskey, three tumblers, and her voluptuous schoolfriend from South Carolina, Courtney Cowart, a fun-loving Anglican theologian. The limousine delivered us to the Radio City Music Hall for a concert by Ray Charles." - Alexander Chancellor, Some Times in America

Ah, those fun-loving Anglican theologians. So quintessentially American.

[Some Times in America, by Alexander Chancellor, Bloomsbury, 1999. Distinguished former Spectator editor spends enjoyable time out of his depth on the New Yorker. A thicket of dropped names.]

Henry James of the PCC. "Isabel looked at her companion in much wonderment; it struck her as strange that a nature in which she found so much to esteem should break down so in spots. 'My poor Henrietta,' she said, 'you've no sense of privacy.'
"Henrietta coloured deeply, and for a moment her brilliant eyes were suffused, while Isabel found her more than ever inconsequent. 'You do me great injustice,' said Miss Stackpole with dignity. 'I've never written a word about myself!'" - Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Non-British or non-journalistic readers can find out what "PCC" means here. They are likely to be disappointed.
[The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James. Adequate praise would require more space and more time than is available on a blog. Wendy Lesser could start you off, though.]

Play nicely, children. This, from Jeremy Paxman's The Political Animal, is about the election defeat of the former Tory whip Derek Conway: "By teatime on polling day, Conway knew his time was up. Astonishingly, Shrewsbury, a town which had remained the plaything of the landed gentry long after universal suffrage, was to be represented in the next parliament by a Labour MP. Conway claims that he took the blow philosophically. But pick at the scab and the poison is still bitter. The 1,800 votes taken by the two anti-European parties could have given him victory. 'Had it not been for James Goldsmith's intervention I'd have won. He died of pancreatic cancer,' he says, and then adds in the most chilling tone, 'I hear it's the most painful of deaths. I'm so pleased.'"
Goldsmith's own reputation for niceness was not of the highest, of course. But still.
[The Political Animal: An Anatomy, by Jeremy Paxman, Michael Joseph, 2002. The political animals anatomised are British MPs, and the main question considered is why we - and Paxman in particular - so despise them. Fluent, readable, funny, well-researched (although he says the Rector of Stiffkey was eaten by a lion, which is wrong) and almost unbearably smug.]

Self defined. "In later years Murray liked to tell of a dream he had that illustrated Samuel Johnson's likely reaction to his appointment. Boswell seemingly asked the Great Cham, 'What would you say, Sir, if you were told that in a hundred years' time a bigger and better dictionary than yours would be compiled by a Whig?' Johnson merely grunted. 'A dissenter?' Johnson shifted, a little uneasily, in his chair. 'A Scotsman?' Johnson started, and began to speak: 'Sir...' But Boswell persisted. 'And that the University of Oxford would publish it.' 'Sir,' roared Johnson, unable to contain himself. 'In order to be facetious, it is not necessary to be indecent.'" - Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything
Murray, you will have guessed, is James Murray, of Oxford English Dictionary fame. Cf, if you get the chance, Max Beerbohm's for-and-against versions of how Johnson would react to the restoration of his house in Gough Square. You'll have to go to the house to do so, because they are written in pencil on a caricature hanging in the hall. But it's probably worth it.
[The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester, Oxford, 2003. Vast store of juicy anecdotage roughly connected to the construction of the OED. The devil's side of the bargain is a somewhat slack-minded approach to history and lexicographical crit, and an authorial presence so insistent you could slap it.]

Green Cross Code Man, pray for me. This is a long one, and before we start, you need to know that 'Park' is Chicago school sociologist Richard E. Park. Ready now?
"To get from my flat to the nearest tube station, I have to walk round two sides of a grassy square full of pigeons, then cross a tumultuous main road on which heavy trucks persistently thunder. Park seems to suggest that because these trucks fulfil someone else's 'recognised needs' I ought to say to myself: 'I don't mind being kept hopping in fear of my life for ten minutes at the side of the road, because quite clearly Mr X needs to transport his tractor parts to the Continent in container lorries and I recognise his right as a fellow citizen to temporarily inconvenience me.' In fact I feel about the road much as a primitive tribesman might feel about a dangerous river given to unpredictable floods. I personify and apostrophise it, I attribute mysterious and malign volitions to its traffic, and it frequently disturbs my dreams. The example is perhaps frivolous: the general point is not. When the needs and reason for things of 'culture' become sufficiently divorced form our own personal needs and wishes, they turn as intractably alien as anything in nature. A road full of container trucks blocking my path seems to me, at the time of barely-avoided impact, almost uniquely irrational; a park full of grass, trees and pigeons strikes me as a thoroughly sensible arrangement." - Jonathan Raban, Soft City.
[Soft City, by Jonathan Raban, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1974. Although rather dated in the intensity of its despair about civic planning, this captures a lot of the sensations of being new and lost in a big city. And if only they'd bring it back into print, I could stop buying secondhand copies and giving them to people.]

Dropped intro. Frederic Reynolds, 12 years old, thought he was going to die. He was walking down the narrow passage between Vinegar Yard and Bridges Street at nine o'clock on a May evening in 1777, when he heard a terrible noise above his head. The sudden, tremendous rumble made him sure that Drury Lane theatre, which formed one side of the passage, was collapsing, and that he was going to be killed. He covered his head with his hands and ran for his life, but 'found the next morning that the noise did not arise from the falling of the house, but from the falling of the screen in the fourth act; so violent and so tumultuous was the applause and laughter.' He had passed by the opening night of Sheridan's new play, The School for Scandal." - Fintan O'Toole, A Traitor's Kiss
[A Traitor's Kiss: The Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, by Fintan O'Toole, Granta, London, 1997. I never realised that Sheridan had so much politics in him; nor that they were of such a good democratic sort. And you can judge the journalistic pizzazz from the above.]

The years of cholera. This is from a passage in Jonathan Glancey's London - Bread and Circuses praising the construction of the city's sewage system: "Mind you, the job was only done because of the Great Stink of 1858, which meant that the windows of the Palace of Westminster had to be draped with curtains soaked in chloride of lime to mitigate the disgusting smell. The stink came from the Thames, an open sewer for all the city's effluence after a law was passed in 1847 banning domestic cesspits. No longer did salmon leap along the Thames as they had done at the beginning of the century (they returned in 1974). The river was effectively dead. And dangerous. Cholera epidemics broke out soon afterwards."
This means that in the Macaulay passage below, the progress of the centuries is being measured against a social evil that was fresh the previous year. That makes him tougher and even more heedless than I thought.
[London - Bread and Circuses, by Jonathan Glancey, Verso, London, 2001. Beautifully illustrated polemic on London's need for municipal socialism. Buy; lend; draft author for mayor.]

Difficulties of being God. "Two years after Nicole was born, Dennis and Angela's next youngest child, Anne, was knocked down by a van outside their house and died in hospital a few hours later. I have avoided direct presentation of this incident because frankly I find it too painful to contemplate. Of course, Dennis and Angela and Anne are fictional characters, they cannot bleed or weep, but they stand here for all the real people to whom such disasters happen with no apparent reason or justice. One does not kill off characters lightly, I assure you, even ones like Anne, evoked solely for that purpose." - David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?
This chatter is programmatic: demystification of narrative in a novel about the demystification of the Catholic church. It being a demystified novel, you are later told so. But it's uncomfortable in ways that I'm not sure were planned. The sense that talking like that is somehow cheating is probably meant to be there; but the sense of disclaiming responsibility for a world one designed is probably not.
[How Far Can You Go?, by David Lodge, Secker and Warburg, London, 1980. Smarter and more serious, I think, than the campus novels. Same coy experimentalism, though.]

Progress. "The year 1685 was not accounted sickly; yet in the year 1685 more than one in twenty-three of the inhabitants of the capital died. At present only one inhabitant of the capital in forty dies annually. The difference in salubrity between the London of the nineteenth century and the London of the seventeenth century is very far greater than the difference between London in an ordinary year and London in a year of cholera." - Thomas Babington Macaulay (writing in the 1840s), in the first volume of his History of England.
The gap between us and Macaulay helps make the gap between now and 1685 seem bigger, no? It's the cheery "year of cholera" coda does it.
Having said that, London's now at about one death per hundred, which isn't as much better as I might have hoped.
[The History of England from the Accession of James II, by Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1849-1861. I'm only three-quarters of the way through Vol. I (there are five), so comment is reserved. It's very quotable, though; expect more.]

City life. "Tokyo turns you into a bank account with a carcass in tow. The size of this single number dictates where the carcass may live, what it drives, how it dresses, who it sucks up to, who it may date and marry, whether it cleans itself in a gutter or a jacuzzi." - David Mitchell, number9dream.
Only Toyko?
[number9dream, by David Mitchell, Sceptre, 2001. The dreams and observations of a twenty-year-old boy coming to the city to find his father. Except the real life tips back and forth into action-movie dreamland, which doesn't always work. The prose, on the other hand, stays consistently fresh-eyed, precise, and lucid.]

Analysis. "The journalist was frankly dumbfounded when he realized that there was no aspect of this particular problem which he could blame directly on the Government. He merely snapped, 'Why do you tolerate such things? As a nation, we are what we are today because of our lack of positive grip over our affairs. We don't know where we are going or why. It is part of the policy of drift, which is our curse.'" - R.K. Narayan, The Man-eater of Malgudi.
[The Man-eater of Malgudi, by R.K. Narayan, Heinemann, 1961. The man-eater is a rogue taxidermist and former professional strongman, who makes hot the life of a mild small-time printer. Makes me want to read more Narayan soon.]

The limits of gourmandism. "'But I swear to you that nothing I have eaten before or since that day has ever tasted so good as those little morsels of arak-flamed Arab boy, stewed to tender perfection, 10,000 feet above sea level in a rocky cleft beneath a volcanic peak in the mountainous region of Sudan known as Jebel Mara.'
"He paused and grinned wickedly. Then he looked into his empty bowl and said, 'At least not until today.'" - James Delingpole, Fish Show.
[Fish Show, by James Delingpole, Penguin, 1997. A restaurant reviewer on a magazine somewhat like the Spectator discovers and abuses magical powers. It's as whimsical as it sounds. Very witty; but without enough style to cover the lack of anything much else.]

The auld enemy. "But what had distinguished Stephen Lime, what had afforded him the opportunities to soar above heights his father had never imagined, was that he had been the one with the vision to realise that there was an exception to the rule - that there was something you could invest in that guaranteed vast returns for negligable risk.
"It was called the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain." - Christopher Brookmyre, Quite Ugly One Morning.
He goes on, of course, to be murderously corrupt. This quotation is given to register my unexpected feeling of nostalgia at remembering what it was like to have a government you despised and an opposition you were sure would fix things. Not that I want to feel that rage again live.
[Quite Ugly One Morning, by Christopher Brookmyre, Little, Brown and Company, 1996. Crime-and-satire thing, hilarious but with curlicues all over the place.]

Getting done. "'I said, "I want to advise you of your rights."
"'He said, "I know my rights, don't bother."
"'I said, "I want to advise you. Everybody has to be advised of their rights."
"'He said, "What can I tell ya? If you got witnesses, I'm fucked."
"'I said, "We got witnesses."
"'He said, "Well, then I'm fucked."'" - the taking of Frank Koehler, in A Cold Case, by Philip Gourevitch.
[A Cold Case, by Philip Gourevitch, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. A spare, humane police procedural, written without the curlicues you'd feel obliged to invent if you were making it up, or the ones a less good journalist would have tacked on.]

A testimonial. "BURNS, ROBERT. Robert Burns' humane and lyrical rationalism had no impact upon the formation of this book, a fact more sinister than any exposed by mere attribution of sources. See also Emerson." - from the Index of Plagiarisms in Lanark by Alasdair Gray.
[Lanark, by Alasdair Gray, Canongate, 1981. A centaur, half bildungsroman and half dystopia, and with an air of having grown slowly in the back of someone's mind for a very, very long time.]

Squelch. "How pleasing that such profound prattle should inevitably find its way into print! 'Not precisely a symphony in white... for there is a yellowish dress.. brown hair, etc... another with reddish hair... and of course there is the flesh colour of the complexions.'
"Bon Dieu! did this wise person expect white hair and chalked faces? And does he then, in his astounding consequence, believe that a symphony in F contains no other note, but shall be a continued repetition of F, F, F? ...Fool!" - James McNeill Whistler, in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, responding to a review of his painting "Symphony in White No. III" in the Saturday Review.
[The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, by James McNeill Whistler, Heinemann, 1890. Consists mostly of cuttings from Whistler's critics, followed by the slashings he sent in response. Lots of pettiness, lots of random French phrases, lots of English that doesn't make actual sense (or at least not now), but enough venom and penetration to remain addictive.]

Obvious but useful. "Like many at the time, he chose to overlook what is clear to anyone who has spent time with the mentally ill - the extraordinary pain involved. To find authenticity in the signs of madness is like finding a desirable simplicity in poverty; only those not obliged to experience either can afford such intellectual slackness." - Jenny Diski, in Don't, on R.D. Laing.
[Don't, by Jenny Diski, Granta, 1998. Sauntering, polished essays which turn out to improve on collection. The subtexts line up; the jokes, mostly, don't repeat. I wonder how much editing that took her.]

Gut politics. "Mr. Polly's system, like a confused and ill-governed democracy, had been brought to a state of perpetual clamour and disorder, demanding now evil and unsuitable internal satisfactions such as pickles and vinegar and the crackling on pork, and now vindictive external expression, such as war and bloodshed throughout the world." - H.G. Wells, The History of Mr. Polly.
This restates an earlier, purpler passage in which Mr. Polly's stomach is "like a badly managed industrial city during a period of depression; agitators, acts of violence, strikes, the forces of law and order doing their best, rushings to and fro, upheavals, the Marseillaise, tumbrils, the rumble and thunder of the tumbrils"; but the substitution of 'democracy' for 'city', and the closeness of bad food to world war, probably brings you nearer what Wells wanted you to think.
[The History of Mr. Polly, by H. G. Wells, 1910. Will never be fashionable again. Read it anyway.]

Max Beerbohm considered as a yoof columnist. "Shortly after Max's success with his Works, Harmsworth put at his disposal a column in the Daily Mail. Max came on board in December 1896 and had carte blanche to write about anything he wished - fire brigades, sign-boards, knighthoods. The pieces all had the kind of smart-alecky hook Harmsworth liked. 'What I want ever morning in the paper,' Harmsworth said, 'is something new and strange.'" - N. John Hall, Max Beerbohm: A kind of a life.
To translate: Beerbohm was hired by the first modern British newspaper baron as a means of exploiting the decadence craze. He was chosen to write look-at-me comment on subjects which he was unqualified to discuss, except as a representative of a certain kind of young person. This should be sounding familiar. It may be of comfort to Bidisha, Johann Hari et al that he went on to be one of the most admired personal essayists in English.
[Max Beerbohm: A kind of a life, by N. John Hall, Yale 2002. Written in a glaringly first-person style as a tribute to its subject, and an excellent demonstation of how hard that style is to master.]