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“... occasional cause of the foundation of the BAAS was a letter from David Brewster, in Edinburgh, to Charles Babbage, in London, suggesting this new initiative in their campaign to halt the ‘decline of science’ in Britain. The efficient cause of success was the Reverend William Venables Vernon Harcourt, founder of the York Philosophical Society, who became ...”

“... rather unevenly through the canon. Milton, Goldsmith (but no Jane Austen), plenty of Scott and Dickens (but less Thackeray). The general conclusion one draws is that painters matched rather than enlarged their taste in literary excursions. Milton’s Comus allowed Etty to assemble a nude rout which the Times thought was ‘handled in a way entirely too ...”

“... allowed Robert Maxwell to slip quietly into the ocean rather than ending up in the dock. Austen or Dickens would never have tolerated such a botched finale. For the Lukácsian case about realism, technique is an optional extra, like having a stereo or a sunroof in your car. It is his or her position in history which allows a writer to see into the heart of ...”

“... translator, notably of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Dos Passos, Melville and Dickens, and published essays on them and other English and American writers. In the 1930s, this was a conscious contribution to the Anti-Fascist intellectual culture which endured in Turin: as Pavese reminisced after the war, ‘for many, the encounter with ...”

“... in the 1840s to populate the huge rockery, fissured with crevices and ravines, which Sir Charles Isham created in front of his bedroom window. The rockery reflected Isham’s love of the Alpine but he was also widely read in folklore, a believer in spiritualism and convinced of the existence of ‘mine fairies’. Vegetarian, against blood ...”

“... first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom’. Hall thinks – what might at first glance appear paradoxical – that he also ...”

“... of the Saxon Kings (1848), ‘last of’ has been almost obligatory in book titles, picked up by Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake, Last of the English (1866), and continued more recently in Hebe Weenolsen’s The Last Englishman (Hereward again, 1951) and Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King (Harold again, 1997). Tom Licence uses the phrase in a ...”

“... what has been done in his name. Marxism is not Karl Marx, it is true, any more than Darwinism is Charles Darwin. You may not be astonished by this thought. ‘What neither his enemies nor his disciples are willing to acknowledge is the most obvious yet startling of all his qualities: that this mythical ogre and saint was a human being.’ Perhaps such an ...”

“... In the centre of the room there are two skeletons. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, faces the front. His skeleton, tainted brown because of the speed and secrecy of its preparation, is seven feet ten inches tall. So towering are the bones, and so impossibly hefty is their accompanying leather boot, that it’s easy to walk past without noticing the adjacent filigree form ...”

“... a windfall of new evidence, but Mr Holden is too courtly (his previous subjects include Prince Charles and the Queen Mum) to name it. He merely says demurely that he persuaded Olivier’s friend, their shared publisher Lord Weidenfeld, that – how does he put it? – ‘between them [Olivier’s] two books did not add up to a comprehensive, let alone ...”

“... or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters – Dickens and Balzac even – were flagrantly guilty.’ Pinfold is by admission a self-portrait, so Waugh must have expected readers to speculate on how this observation applied to his own career, and whether he was a one or a two-book man himself. In 1958, a ...”

“... for a firm hand, for making an example of the ringleaders, what are things coming to, and so on. Dickens’s Mr Bounderby, although no gentleman, put the position in a nutshell with ‘the turtle soup and the gold spoon’ – his own blunt résumé of the trade-unionist’s unmistakable goals. As James’s people are constantly telling each other how ...”

“... friends, among them Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Dumas père (to the dismay of ditto fils) and Dickens. She satisfied Swinburne’s longing for ‘Our Lady of Pain’, though the poet confided to Edmund Gosse that she was deficient as a lover, in that she tended to wake early and recite her poems to him, ‘swinging her handsome legs on the edge of the bed ...”

“... made British landowners even more wary of state intervention. Despite the best efforts of Ruskin, Dickens and many others, Parliament refused seven times to pass a National Monuments Preservation Bill. It was unacceptable because, as Sir John Holker, the attorney general, put it, it would be the thin end of a wedge which might extend beyond ...”

“... relations, energy security and global trade are explored in The Future History of the Arctic by Charles Emmerson.* But the idea that a thawing Arctic is something to be afraid of would have baffled our ancestors. For the men who sailed from Europe in search of a northwest passage, and for the men who sent them, the ice was what there was to fear, and a ...”