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“... A t the end​ of The Coral Island (1857), the teenage castaways are rescued from bloodthirsty ‘savages’ by the arrival of Christian missionaries. R.M. Ballantyne’s most famous book – which was required reading for British and American schoolchildren until the middle of the 20th century – pitches an ideal of Victorian boyhood against godless pirates and backward foreigners ...”

“... What​ Leonora Carrington remembered most clearly about being a debutante in 1935 was her tiara ‘biting’ into her skull. In her short story ‘The Debutante’, the teenage narrator hates balls, ‘especially when they are given in my honour’ (Carrington’s parents threw one for her at the Ritz), so she engages a hyena to take her place: the animal is about the right size, and she reckons nobody will make it out properly in the candlelight ...”

“... There are​ approximately twenty billion Sun-like stars in the Milky Way. Scientists think that up to a quarter of them are orbited by planets where water could be present; if the same holds true in other galaxies, it would mean fifty sextillion or so planets in the observable universe where intelligent life may have evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that potential seem ridiculously small ...”

“... In 1936​, two very different novels about plantation culture and the Southern experience of the Civil War received verdicts from the New York Times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind – with its cast of gallant gentlemen and cheerful slaves – was ‘in sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction’. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! – with its gallery of ruthless parvenus and race-fixated slavers – featured ‘one of the most complex, unreadable and uncommunicative prose styles ever to find its way into print ...”

“... my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were long, sometimes fulsome, always affectionate, and full of great table talk and ...”

“... stopped some reviewers from praising or damning the book for doing things it carefully avoids. Edmund Gordon, in the Telegraph, wrote that Hamid’s use of the second person allows him ‘to implicitly pair the trajectory of his hero’s life with the trajectories of millions of other lives’ when what it really does is make you conscious of how ...”

“... to stigmatise the child, Lewes forgave the offence and allowed the boy to be registered as Edmund Lewes – perhaps with a wry glance at the bastard in King Lear. But the offence was repeated; and before Agnes bore the second of her four or five children by Hunt, Lewes had ceased to regard her as his wife. Yet, having condoned her adultery, he was ...”

“... these two books have in common, so my comments will be seriatim. The earliest of the essays in the Gordon collection, which is by Gernet, who died in 1962 at the age of 80, first appeared as long ago as 1948; the remainder at various dates since 1968. Of the latter, three are by Vernant, five by Vidal-Naquet, three by Detienne. The fact that the Gernet item ...”

“... chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy enjoyed the same revenge on Edmund Wilson; the witches of Eastwick (lacking only their Hardwick) have vented about Robert Lowell. To interview all the exes of Philip Rahv would be an undertaking from which the most committed Boswellian might recoil. (Though it’s fascinating to speculate ...”

“... Craig, had a career as a designer, director and producer of feminist plays; her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, acted with Irving, but became disillusioned with the English theatre and, like other maverick theatre visionaries since, moved to the Continent, where his (rare) productions and extensive theoretical writings are said to have revolutionised theatre ...”

“... Known Figures’, compiled by Carol Brightman, which the reader comes on at the end of the book. Edmund Wilson, one of the Better Known figures, is referred to but has no walk-on part: that marriage is yet to be. Early days with the grandparents in Seattle are mostly a matter of books. Mother and father died of Spanish flu in 1918 on the train on which the ...”

“... already fading from the language when the figure who inspired the term, the flamboyant bookseller Edmund Curll, had been dead for less than a decade. Chatterton was still using it a generation later (‘I know the art of Curlism, pretty well,’ his persona Harry Wildfire boasts), and the phenomenon still flourishes in the media today, though without the ...”

“... include two Welshmen) are not all equally famous. Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, and perhaps Edmund Law, need no introduction. But William Worthington and John Gordon have not previously been placed in the august company of the Humes and Priestleys. Worthington figures briefly in the DNB and Williams’s Eminent ...”

“... pruning of the naughty bits) and chose as their appointed biographer a 24-year-old American, Gordon Ray, who had just finished a doctorate on ‘Thackeray and France’. It was an eccentric choice: they could have had their pick of British biographers. But they wanted someone as remote from London’s gossip circuits as possible. Ray – as was standard ...”

“... called Nellie Kershaw was described in the British Medical Journal by a pathologist called William Edmund Cooke, who found that her lungs contained ‘particles of mineral matter’, most of them with ‘sharp angles’. But it would take decades for companies to acknowledge that mesothelioma could be caused by relatively brief exposure to asbestos. In the ...”