“... in their place) that we lack a proper historical sense. It may be true. The New Zealand poet Charles Brasch wrote poems looking forward to a time when we, too, would have a landscape littered with ruins. ‘The plains are nameless and the cities cry for meaning,’ he wailed. I think he may have been remembering New Zealand from his rooms in an Oxford ...”

“... are of particular interest; and others like them may yet be found. The discovery of the play Sir Charles Grandison, or The Happy Man, the work of Jane Austen and her niece Anna, suggests that there may even yet be additions to the small body of literary manuscripts. There, at present, the documentary record ends; and the biographer must constantly allow for ...”

“... have spread a network of subversion across Europe. By likening Frankenstein to the Arctic explorer Walton, Mary Shelley further emphasises his alienation from the society even of his own class and family. If he is a dissident, he could be one of the presumptuous individuals Burke liked to thunder at. Perhaps because she meant to frustrate the highly ...”

“... of the professional scientist. In his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage dismissed the amateur tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious advancement of scientific knowledge. As young men now applied themselves to the study of law, he argued, future scientists must devote themselves to the mastery of ...”

“... trail, and all three were eventually convicted of shill bidding. In 2006, one of them, Kenneth Walton, published an entertaining and half-apologetic account of his part in the scam, Fake: Forgery, Lies and eBay.4 As well as placing artificial bids for each other’s goods, Walton and his confederates hiked their ...”

“... of Willingale was a quiet country parson in the 1780s. His forebear Sir John Bramston had been Charles I’s lord chief justice, and in 1635 he very prudently bought Skreens Park, a few miles west of Chelmsford. There he and his family remained, heads down, for the duration of the Civil War. Following a similar logic, a three-storey-deep indestructible ...”

“... history’: a detailed study of the ways in which tattered texts that had belonged to one writer, Charles Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which ...”

“... which was then great with child’ is one charge; that he had ‘outrageously beaten one Judith Walton & stamped upon her so that she was carried home in [a] chair’ is another; both women were probably prostitutes). His name would perhaps be forgotten today but for his collaboration with Shakespeare on Pericles (c.1607), to which (it is generally ...”

“... the Provençal poet, is pretty dull. The book which best deserves reprinting is The Strang Life of Charles Waterton (1782-1865), a biography of the recklessly eccentric naturalist and taxidermist, published in 1949. Here was a rumbustious, unaffected figure whom Aldington could admire without reservation. Squire Waterton had a perfect contempt for social ...”

“... true.’ But what was it? Did it belong to Sisson’s youthful, and persisting, admiration for Charles Maurras (once described by Eliot as ‘a Virgil who led some of us to the gates of the temple’)? One is grateful for a positive emotion: but we are not permitted to have its source or its larger context, and it lies there mysterious among the ...”

“... Bezos is the king of logistics and technology; the queen of logistics, the Walmart heiress Ann Walton, owns the largest US-built motor yacht since the 1930s, Aquila. Yacht-owners on the East Coast include hedge fund managers and real estate tycoons and berth their boats in Miami, close to the Caribbean yachting destinations where many also discreetly own ...”

“... and extending coverage of the great masters, alongside surprises – ‘Casta Diva’ from Norma, Walton’s Crown Imperial march, exquisitely appreciative introductions to Debussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune and Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (the prose résumés of Rückert’s poems bring tears to the eyes); a few characteristic lost-cause dead ducks; a ...”

“... American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was reported missing. When he reappeared five days later, he said that he had been held captive on a spacecraft by short, bald, dome-headed beings. The National Enquirer arranged a polygraph test, which he spectacularly flunked, the ...”

“... that led my father to choose the suburbs of Surrey, but a more particular reason for the choice of Walton-on-Thames I discovered one Sunday on a walk with my father. As we passed a pair of crumbling lodge gates, and looked down a straight avenue of bedraggled trees, about a hundred yards long, which led to a copse, above which could be seen a small clock ...”