“... of a shock is a bag lady finding a copy of Sartor Resartus in a Manhattan trash can. You think: Thomas Carlyle! On East End Avenue! Wild! Passages in All the Days and Nights suggest the earnest exposition of a local historian: ‘The business district of Draperville, Illinois (population 12,000) was built around a neo-Roman courthouse and the courthouse ...”

“... as ‘non-indigenous’) is Edge of Trees. It represents the line of vegetation at the top of the beach through which the first gaggle of British colonists looked for the natives who Sir Joseph Banks, urging the settlement, had said would not pose much of a problem. That line, across which black Australia stared back, was a threshold between visibility and ...”

“... remembered and determining an inescapable future for everyone who was there. In On Chesil Beach (2007) – where the horror is of a different kind, since the disastrous wedding night is only experienced as horror by the wife who can’t even bear the intrusion of her new husband’s tongue when they kiss – the pivotal moment that derails two lives ...”

“... One of the greatest elegies of the 20th century was written in a flat-roofed Australian beach house beside scribbly-gums and banksias in 1975. The poem and the circumstances out of which it grew are painful. Nearly 20 years ago the poet allowed an Australian academic, Bruce Bennett, to publish details of the events behind it in Spirit in Exile ...”

“... The memory of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy from Kobani who was found drowned on a Turkish beach, has now been eclipsed by a passport found near the corpse of one of the attackers. That this assailant made his way to France through Greece, carrying a passport in the name of a dead Syrian fighter, suggests careful planning. The purpose is not merely to ...”

“... The Oval Window is packed with lines from a 1981 book on database systems). I once asked Thomas Nagel where I could find the line attributed to him in Not-You (1993) – ‘Love of semiconductors is not enough’ – and initially he denied having written it. When, having found the answer elsewhere, I put it to him, he was delightfully ...”

“... and what he is reading and wants to read. Yeats and Rilke dominate the talk of poetry. Edward Thomas, the figure behind the best poems in Raiders’ Dawn, is not mentioned. Lewis asks: ‘Will you copy for me Yeats’s poem “Solomon and the Witch” from the red Weekend Book … When I found it on the last morning I realised how much I needed it. And ...”

“... didn’t insist on crowding the landscape and interposing themselves; a previous vacation to St Thomas had been ruined for Alexandra and her late husband when their rental car was besieged in traffic, ‘surrounded by black drivers who took a racist pleasure in tailgating them’. Here Alexandra has to contend with the milder nuisance of a stock Asian ...”

“... the Serapis, commanded by Richard Pearson, and the Countess of Scarborough, commanded by Thomas Piercy – engaged the Americans, allowing the convoy to escape and shelter under Scarborough Castle.The battle raged for hours. Hundreds of people came out to watch. Cannon balls bounced off the cliffs. The Bonhomme Richard was slower than the ...”

“... be cleaner, more self-referential, more knowing or more minxy. In relation to Hollywood, Thomas Mann (from his perch at Pacific Palisades) had pronounced Isherwood ‘starry-eyed’, but Isherwood had learned more than Mann about gay sexual deportment. Carrying the Weimar spirit with him, writing with vitality, irony and humour, Isherwood deserves ...”

“... just in time. The hero is mortally wounded, and dies, talking to the end, on a lonely beach. I have to take on faith from Anderson that El filibusterismo, like many another late 19th-century novel, has immensely more aesthetic energy than its silly story would suggest. And Under Three Flags certainly succeeds in placing the novel and its author in ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”

“... and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age demanded’ Schnabel: ‘the notion that the man is an emanation of the Zeitgeist no doubt matches the artist’s fantasies about himself.’ It also, of course, matches what Hughes has just said about him. I ...”

“... of homosexual fellatio’. Then he cools us down. ‘That is to move too far ahead.’ Thomas Carlyle, another prodigious filler of shelves, reckoned that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men.’ The pathos formula perfected by Ackroyd. Carlyle did not enjoy such a smooth passage. ‘Swimming in the Mother of Dead Dogs, and ...”

“... in question, a prominent Chicago businessman related to one of the founders of the university, Thomas Wakefield Goodspeed. Bob Hutchins’s partisans gossip to this day about Maude’s psychic frailties. In a 1990 essay, entitled ‘The Sad Story of the Boy Wonder’, Joseph Epstein, an undergraduate at Chicago in the Hutchins era, compared her both to ...”