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“... 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 ...”

“... not only to wrest control of the sickroom from Lord Lovelace and to banish unorthodox friends like Charles Babbage, but to extort the dying woman’s confession of adultery with a neighbour, thereby permanently alienating the married couple. Though Lovelace began an idealised account of the courage with which his wife confronted her suffering, the revelation ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them – the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other. What would the Rev ...”

“... basic scenario’? Many onlookers have asked the question, most notable among them the sociologist Charles Tilly who, in The Contentious French (1986), engaged with a much broader swathe of French violence, from food riots to civil wars, and offered a nuanced sociological explanation. Burton, by focusing more narrowly on ‘expiatory’ violence, with its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not only of the famous. She brings alive for the reader a host of lesser characters: the cuckolded Charles Bagot, ‘pink, erect in native dignity, and, I hope, not valuing her’ – his wife – ‘a pinch of snuff’; old Lady Carlisle in a portrait ‘attitudinising with vases’; the hunting-mad Duke of Beaufort and the ...”

“... extra-Roth material that Bloom has to hand. Here, after all, is a woman who starred opposite Charles Chaplin at the age of 19 and who has acted with almost all the great actors of the mid-20th-century English theatre. Having enjoyed romantic trysts with Yul Brynner at Cecil B. De Mille’s country retreat, committed adultery with Lawrence ...”

“... seems is less interesting intellectually than a novel with which it shares a liquid affinity – Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies. Kingsley’s Christian Socialism linked potable water and spiritual purity in a sentimental fusion not dissimilar from Cheever’s. But whereas Kingsley was motivated by an indignation which even to this day has a power to carry ...”

“... fool enough to go to a desert island it is undoubtedly the work I should take with me. As it is, I hope to read the Diary all through once again before I die. Pepys’s Diary has a special character. Pepys was a competent civil servant who devoted his life to the service of the Admiralty Board. He wrote his Diary in his spare time. He showed it to no ...”

“... case, it is quite clear that many human capacities for communication have a hereditary basis, as Charles Darwin showed long ago – for instance, the smile of an infant and his yell of displeasure. Indeed, all powers of learning and teaching must depend upon particular activities of the brain. Each animal species is programmed to learn in its own special way ...”