This is a marvellous book.
Wood combines the talents of a literary academic with the verve and imagination of a novelist.
It's some of the most interesting literary criticism I've come across. Almost certainly now out of print, so I hope you can hunt down a copy in a good library or secondhand bookshop. The phrase brings back 'laughing and delicious' memories. Stendhal thinks of an English garden near Milan, where a twisting path which seemed to be taking him to unknown parts would suddenly deposit him in front of a familiar shrub or statue. The whole secret of style looks like a secret of structure, and Stendhal may have been exaggerating the range of his idea.