“... was to make lists of celebrities unhappily transfixed in this way by the force of circumstance. Charles Féré, for example, wrote in 1892, citing B.A. Morel: ‘Who has not heard,’ says Morel, ‘of the febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II trembled at the sight of a naked ...”

“... intimately entwined. ‘Space-time’ acts like a medium in which objects are distorted and the passage of time slowed when massive bodies such as planets and stars are present. In the jargon, space-time is ‘warped’. When galaxies collide or stars explode, the warping changes and the disturbance spreads out in ‘gravitational waves’ travelling at the ...”

“... Cavell’s widely influential study of screwball, Pursuits of Happiness (1981). Multimillionaire Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike (Henry Fonda) is beguiled twice over by a temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) whom he encounters for the first time as Jean, a con artist working a cruise ship, and then as Lady Eve Sidwich, guest of honour at a party thrown in the Pike family ...”

“... would corroborate as autobiographical the coarse ‘racism’ we might feel disposed to see in the passage from the Voyage – if we exclude (as I think we have to) Joel Gold’s view that Johnson was trying to show that his Portuguese author was more racist than he was, a scenario as much conditioned by late 20th-century sensitivities as is its more obvious ...”

“... at the time, and had just learned a bit about the play in the volume of Shakespeare stories by Charles and Mary Lamb I had been given for Christmas a few months earlier. Mother’s idea was that she and I should gradually read through the play together. For that purpose a beautiful one-volume Shakespeare was brought down from the shelf, its handsome red ...”

“... in English.’ He felt strongly, he added, ‘that rhymes in English are too emphatic, and in a passage of any length this form of verse becomes tiring.’This section, he wrote,cost me far more time and trouble and vexation than any passage of the same length that I have ever written … It was chiefly that in this very ...”

“... while those with reservations, including the Popular Front critic F.O. Matthiessen and the poet Charles Olson, preferred to align him with Shakespeare, his revolutionary Miltonic essence giving way to a more properly tragic register, with its evocations of madness and fallibility (Lear is Olson’s big parallel) and over-reaching. This was, in a sense, to ...”

“... years has been moving in the direction of greater clarity, cogency and simplicity, he compares a passage from Our Mutual Friend, in which Dickens gives an amusing description of the Veneering family, Mr Podsnap and others in the Veneering dining room, with an account of a bad railway collision at Harrow in l952 and finds the 20th-century ...”

“... Where reason can revolt Without perdition, and loss assume all reason Without revolt ... The passage faithfully expresses, as much as any passage can, the strictly inexpressible tension which deconstructive readings claim to find in every text, literary or philosophical. But it also describes, perhaps aptly, the double ...”

“... as the title for a selection of essays derived from Frazer, George Watson quotes the following passage: In this sacred grove mere grew a certain tree round which ... a grim figure might be seen to prowl ... He was a priest and a murderer: and the man for whom he was looking was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was ...”

“... all prayer factories. So when, in 1536, Bishop Hugh Latimer wrote to Henry VIII just after the passage of a Parliamentary act dissolving smaller monasteries, he made a sharp political point, although with an inexact grasp of Church history: ‘The founding of monasteries argued purgatory to be; so the putting of them down argueth it not to be . . . Now ...”

“... the depleted printers ‘could gett no better’. Fascinated with Roman remains, Aubrey took Charles II to see Avebury in 1663 after discovering the stones while hunting with aristocratic friends; he commissioned drawings of the 12th-century Osney Abbey before it was demolished. Like all busy people, he worked all the time, and felt he wasn’t working ...”

“... and spears, Tudor merchant rings and ornate dress hooks, memorabilia celebrating the marriage of Charles II and Catherine of Braganza in 1662, a lead seal belonging to the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa (c.1660-75). The skeleton of a 12-year-old girl who died in the 18th century, a ball and chain (still locked, probably from one of the prison ...”

“... too: the lawyer William Prynne was sentenced to life imprisonment and had his ears cropped after a passage in his book against plays, Histriomastix, was interpreted as an attack on the queen; Milton’s friend Alexander Gil (the younger) was also fined and threatened with similar mutilation after toasting the health of the assassin of ...”

“... incidental detail; the story itself is simple enough. It tells how Freddie Montgomery (Frederick Charles St John Vanderveld Montgomery, if you please), stout, blond, of some intellect and no substance, king of the expatriate castle on a Mediterranean island, carelessly finds himself owing money to one Señor Aguirre, a local ‘businessman’ given to ...”