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“... effects he achieves by these means can be illustrated from almost anywhere in the book. Take the passage which introduces one of the novel’s leitmotifs: the narrator’s fascination with flying, which eventually leads to his volunteering for the South African Air Force and emerging as a trained bomber pilot shortly before the end of the Second World ...”

“... and bundles of parish records. Marsden is a fellow of Borlase, and of Sabine Baring-Gould and Charles Henderson in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, in his eagerness to find out about that extremity of England which has the largest concentration of standing stones in Britain. No serious theories have explained this, and it is daft to turn the ...”

“... most celebrated cases having been solved incorrectly. The hero of The Manual of Detection is Charles Unwin, a clerk at a detective agency, known only as ‘the Agency’, which occupies all 46 floors of the tallest building in an unnamed city that in some ways is quite like New York, only smaller (the Empire State Building has 102 storeys), and in other ...”

“... would force oncoming mothers with cars full of children onto the grass verge to give us a clear passage. After a couple of miles of this we would enter urban gridlock, where any assassin could walk up to the car and pick his target at leisure – possibly the judge or possibly the high sheriff who, in doublet and hose like the principal boy in Dick ...”

“... metre high – a psychohistory of the movement, recording who met whom and where, and mapping the passage of dozens of people from the early 1940s to the end of the 1960s. No one seems to be missing. And there’s no shortage of ambient sound. Songs collected by Harry Smith for the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952) drift on the air in the first ...”

“... conveniences.As preserved by the National Trust today, and as recorded in the photographs by Charles Latham (which are among the finest tributes to the increasing popularity of Vermeer’s paintings), we find ‘Windsor chairs’ and ‘Lancashire chairs’ as well as a Dutch 17th-century chest of drawers and an old refectory table placed on worn carpets ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover.’ This Churchillian passage may be among his current regrets. Naipaul spent the Eighties in hygienic Wiltshire, and at the end of the decade he was knighted for his services to literature. At this point he went once more to India, and has now published a third book, which may be ...”

“... Scrupulous readers of Eliot’s notes had long been baffled by one that invites us to compare a passage from ‘A Game of Chess’ – ‘Do ‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember ‘Nothing?’ I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. – to line 37 of ‘The Burial of the Dead’: ‘Yet when we came back, late, from the ...”

“... of colleagues. It is here that James differs markedly from his dear and prickly friend, Charles Sanders Peirce, who can be said to have given the name ‘pragmatism’ to American philosophy in a paper James heard in 1872. Both James and Peirce were indebted in their pragmatisms to a definition of belief given by the Scottish ...”

“... the ideas of the movement he founded.Christopher Riedweg’s book is dedicated to Burkert, while Charles Kahn thanks Burkert for ‘superlative’ comments on the manuscript he sent to the publisher. Whenever Pythagoreanism comes up for scholarly study, the Burkert revelation is now everywhere, the anxiety of his influence omnipresent – but with different ...”

“... Forsaken Garden’ (1876) describes a seaside rose garden overrun with thorns: The dense hard passage is blind and stifled That crawls by a track none turn to climb To the strait waste place that the years have rifled Of all but the thorns that are touched not of time. The thorns he spares when the rose is taken, The rocks are left when he wastes the ...”

“... in London.’ She doesn’t mention the reason she came south: when she was three her father, Charles, left and the family was forced to uproot. Her parents had not been happily married; Charles had wanted to be a sailor since he’d been a child but had been pressured by his mother to take over the family business. It ...”

“... the greatest affection on every flower I have known from my infancy,’ Keats writes in a famous passage, ‘their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with a superhuman fancy.’ The illness itself is usually left out of the creative turn which it inspires. To rend the cool web of language requires a ferocity of inward gaze and ...”

“... and literature available to Joyce: Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Freud, Have-lock Ellis, Krafft-Ebing, Charles Albert, Otto Weininger, and many other rhetoricians of sex. The lore is informative, though it is bound to excite the reader into thinking that Joyce was permanently retarded in the matter of sexuality. Brown has a phrase or two from Finnegans Wake to ...”