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“... before he died in a Soho rooming-house, Hazlitt published a lengthy essay on a new biography of Daniel Defoe in the Edinburgh Review, where he remarked that in Robinson Crusoe Defoe abandoned the political and religious subjects he addressed in his pamphlets, and confined himself to ‘unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart’. Hazlitt’s ...”

“... Daniel O’Keefe’s massive survey of magic not only tells us ‘how to do it’ but gives us some policy recommendations too. His book reads like the transcript of a Royal Commission report on the occult. It is not easy reading, but the effort is worthwhile. His advice extends to such fields as politics, economics and war: this scope gives some clue both to the structure and to the theme of Stolen Lightning ...”

“... is that she talked him out of abandoning it. The parallel seems perfect. The book’s hero, Nick Charles, has taken early retirement from sleuthing to pursue his interest in alcohol. (Fans recommend playing a game as you read: to try to match him drink for drink. This would be dangerous.) Nick’s wife, Nora, who never knew him in his detecting ...”

“... liberties, Shakespeare ‘wanted art’, Sharpham, Day and Dekker were ‘all rogues’, Samuel Daniel was ‘a good honest man, but no poet’ – but more importantly it provides the rudiments of autobiography. In Drummond, as in everyone else, there is that uncertain reaction. He is awe-struck yet curiously disappointed. Jonson’s flamboyance is there ...”

“... of the Magnet cast: for instance, we are asked to suppose that Frank Richards (his real name was Charles Hamilton, but Hughes affects not to know this), scouring Eton with a literary purpose in mind, came face to face with a boy called Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. ...”

“... Lords’ appointed for life: Lord Darwin, Lord Bentham, Lord Brunel and above all Lord Babbage. Charles Babbage really lived, of course (though not as a Lord), and really invented merit lordship, the computer, and many other improvements in mechanism. All one needs to accept, to set this novel going, is that Babbage’s genius should be properly recognised ...”

“... focused on thirty individual cases, including those involving three cabinet ministers, Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Prescott. Edis told the court that while their papers were busy hacking to find evidence of other people’s affairs – in January 2003 the Sun ran a story calling Andy Gilchrist, then leading the Fire Brigade Union in a series of strikes ...”

“... the way the reality effect is created with a character, but particularity helps here too. When Charles Bovary first sees Emma, he ‘was surprised by the whiteness of her fingernails. They were glossy, delicate at the tips, more carefully cleaned than Dieppe ivories, and filed into almond shapes.’ Obviously, this tells us something, with great ...”

“... free thinking and social fair dealing’. Tell that to the Muslim detainees in Belmarsh Prison. Daniel Pipes says that ‘Bat Ye’or has traced a nearly secret history of Europe over the past thirty years, convincingly showing how the Euro-Arab Dialogue has blossomed from a minor discussion group into the engine for the continent’s Islamisation.’ You ...”

“... who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia (see his anthology of Serbian poetry, The Horse Has Six Legs, and his numerous single volumes of Lalic, Tadic, Ristovic, Salamun and many more). I wish her patience, talented originals, and many ...”

“... on Hobson’s Imperial race. London, the heart of the Empire, as Hobson’s fellow new liberal, Charles Masterman, declared in The Condition of England (1909), was inhabited by that ‘homogeneous substance: the City Dweller’. This creature had strange crowd propensities which were a source of irresolvable mysteries and riddles. Moreover, ‘it is in the ...”

“... and as then amplified in aggressive (or even more aggressive) ways in America, by figures like Charles Davenport, director, from 1904, of the Carnegie-funded Cold Spring Harbor research station on Long Island. The quality of the writing here resides precisely in the area that some historians of science have found wanting: its biographical speculations. In ...”

“... rarely figured in modern biological inquiry, at least not in its Anglo-American mode. To be sure, Charles Darwin – despite his protestations to the contrary – had strong theoretical inclinations, but he constantly tested and modified his ideas against an enormous array of observational data. Max Perutz, who was for many years the director of the Medical ...”

“... believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice and pity. From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippy movement, but its logical conclusion.’ ‘I’ve lived my life rather than his,’ Houellebecq’s father admits to Demonpion. ‘But I knew he was in good hands.’ Houellebecq always describes his ...”

“... Flecknoe (1682), with its delicate possible parallel between the dunce writer Richard Flecknoe and Charles II, but not Nero the Second. Charles can’t be twinned with Flecknoe as straightforwardly as George I with Nero but, as Keymer shows, it’s the non-straightforwardness of the parallel – the way it’s built up from ...”