“... of his torpor, he follows her to the Congo – about which he knows and cares little – in the hope of putting their relationship on a permanent footing, and in the knowledge that the task is hopeless, that the best of their relationship has already gone, that in his diffidence he has squandered the tenderness she so freely gave him in London. We first ...”

“... of self-annihilation as the price of knowledge – knowledge about nature, society and identity. Charles Darwin and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the novel of that title, the aesthete Walter Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real ...”

“... this saga. The cover of The Fellowship flourishes the names of two of them – Owen Barfield and Charles Williams – alongside those of Tolkien and Lewis. Barfield had become friends with Lewis when they were undergraduates, and was later a frequent companion on his walking tours of rural England and his favourite antagonist in debates. Barfield’s chief ...”

“... be misdiagnosed, delaying identification of the problem and the start of control measures. In 1973 Charles Rondle was conducting research on smallpox at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, using techniques he had learned some years before while working for Allan Downie in Liverpool. The virus was being grown in fertile hens’ eggs. One of the ...”

“... of psychic instability. Edward entered a home for the insane at 19 and died there 60 years later, Charles went in for opium, Arthur for alcohol. Septimus would introduce himself to a stranger by rising from the hearthrug where he had been lying, extending a languid hand, and saying: ‘I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.’ The daughters were ...”

“... bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American writer Jacob Epstein, whose first novel, Wild Oats (1979), included a number of sentences taken straight from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. These plagiarists, he found, nearly always used the notebook defence: they’d copied ...”

“... unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the ...”

“... experience in that area,’ a fellow Republican says of the testimony of Nixon’s thuggish aide, Charles Colson (post-Watergate, an evangelical minister). Obfuscation was second nature – to the very end. In his resignation speech, Nixon, wily as ever, seemed to suggest that he was stepping down because he had lost the support of Congress. This puzzles ...”

“... glimpses of them in the houses of wealthier, older friends. They had names such as Hamish or Charles, wore cavalry twill trousers, blazers and Viyella shirts. Having some artisan in Lima sculpt a block of cocaine into a likeness of an Inca god then lacquer it against detection by Customs and Excise was a wizard wheeze for these dashing chaps, who, while ...”

“... have helped to further the adventures of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Billy Bunter and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead storyteller. The late, prolific Alistair MacLean (‘Ach, any idiot ...”

“... and works, as Viljoen already knew. Ruskin’s literary executors, led by Viljoen’s compatriot Charles Eliot Norton, had burnt all that they could find that related to Rose or had been written by her. The diary must have escaped their bonfire, but in the event the manuscript was to disappear again in a year or two. Viljoen retained her transcript. As far ...”

“... Journal of Photography made by Conan Doyle between 1881 and 1885, and the editors express the hope that it will appeal to those ‘with an interest ... in his famous creation, Sherlock Holmes’. There is not the slightest reason why it should do anything of the kind. Holmes himself, indeed, might have been interested in the piece called ‘A Few ...”

“... concerns the great dead, she became known in the 1980s as a champion of the language poets: Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews and perhaps a dozen others, who first published during the 1970s in a brace of little magazines, one of which bore the all too catchy name ...”

“... Ellen (note her initials), was serially unfaithful: in other words, he’s a sprightly updating of Charles Bovary, however much he would resist the comparison. In his defence, Braithwaite might point out that ‘Charles n’était pas de ceux qui descendent au fond des choses,’ while he is determined to get to the bottom ...”

“... vast work of American history: Perry Miller’s two-volume study The New England Mind. Miller’s hope for that book was similar to O’Brien’s: he sought to recover the Puritans from the dismissive views of his contemporaries, who had been inclined to see dourness and even anti-intellectualism where Miller saw reason and order. Miller’s task was made ...”