Mailed fist

The academic habit of biting the hand that feeds lives on in Elaine Showalter, chair of the English department at Princeton University. Delivering the Northcliffe lecture at University College, London this week, she described the literary regeneration of the early 1890s and its sudden - if temporary - demise. Its death, she said, was partially caused by the Daily Mail, first published in 1896, which appealed to lesser-educated readers' jingoism and caused the nation to forget arts and letters. And the publisher of this murderer of the infant renaissance? None other than Lord Northcliffe, then known as Alfred Harmsworth.