“... quoted, including an arrangement during the phoney war months for each partner to read the same passage in the Bible every day at the same time. In addition, the diaries became increasingly an outlet for tensions and frustrations – but they do not provide a fair, objective account either of the man or of his opinions on individuals. It must be said, in ...”

“... reads like a series of postcards home, complete with snaps: Self with the Queen, Self with Prince Charles, Kenyatta, Chairman Hua, Lee Kuan Yew, Self receiving life-membership of the NUT (some gift!), Self receiving honorary doctorate, Self in state robes. The great events of history alternate, paragraph by cosy paragraph, with the great events of his ...”

“... to attorney, and from there to secretary of the Bombay council. One of his colleagues in India, Charles Carmichael, encouraged him to try his hand at a piece of pornography, though Gladfelder, who has a penchant for the dialogic and intertextual, speculates that the work, later to become Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure and then, revised and ...”

“... sounds. Is it Monday or Tuesday? (Does it matter?) Lately the most reliable method of counting the passage of time has been not in days or weeks but in deaths. In New York City, more than seven thousand people have died, more than twice as many as were killed in the 11 September attacks.Most of my friends aren’t leaving their flats. Since recovering my sense ...”

“... for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of Coleridge had he died shipwrecked off Sicily. The audit is positive: what came next, according to Holmes, only damaged his startling early achievements. Even more tantalising questions might be asked of a ...”

“... we learn precisely nothing. To understand how Lawrence revised one must look elsewhere – say to Charles Ross’s The Composition of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’. Ross covers the basics effectively in fifty pages and also reproduces sample pages of the manuscripts, which give a vivid impression of Lawrence’s working habits. Some of these ...”

“... and ensure that the Indian Christians, though still a minority, would eventually come to govern. Charles Kingsley – another of the founders – supported the South in the American Civil War. The passage of time did not bring any further coherence to Christian socialism: a theologically-based morality does not confer any ...”

“... This was one of the most resourceful and engaging of Genette’s Cratylists, the poet and linguist Charles Nodier, writing in 1828 about the hopes he had felt as an 18-year-old, fired as he then was no doubt by the propaganda of the French Revolution. For the dream of linguistic unity could hardly not have a politics to go with it. This could as well be a ...”

“... before it. Allusions by Drake to contemporary politics seem to have been few and far between. A passage quoted by Sharpe as a reflection on the new republic of 1649 appears, from the excerpt we are given, to be merely a somewhat cumbersome exposition of a Renaissance commonplace about the danger of allowing an interval between the death of one king and the ...”

“... very late for a Marvell lyric – not impossible, but the evidence cited is a faint echo of a passage in Paradise Lost. In fact Paradise Regained is a far more relevant connection, and so Marvell’s poem, a kind of throwback, would have to have been written after 1671; but there is no need to suppose that Marvell was mimicking Milton or vice versa ...”

“... of Planes, Trains and Automobiles, his joint-favourite film (the other is Solaris). In the opening passage of his new novel, The Bee Sting, which has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the soberly reported details of a man who killed his family then ‘turned the gun on himself’ give way to a less appalled reaction: ‘Elaine just said she was surprised ...”

“... includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great City, 1868, which mentions ‘cheap ...”

“... a commodity broker. But then he arranged new vacuum-cleaners in a perspex case and sold them to Charles Saatchi. ‘It is my belief,’ announces Januszczac, that art today is largely in the business of supplying frisson, little niblets of existential uncertainty, ways of not-knowing, mysteries, small after-hours pleasures for overworked urban minds ...”

“... this, forgetting to mention that Rome was in fact taken by mercenaries of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. More was astonishingly disingenuous. Throughout the late 1520s, he claimed that anti-clericalism was identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails ...”

“... Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages ...”