“... Jim Conklin, who was trying to outwalk death. Red Badge is the most quotable of books, but the passage that lingers after all others is the five-page account of Henry Fleming’s hasty march beside the spectral figure he is slow to recognise – ‘Gawd! Jim Conklin!’ His grey, appalling face had attracted attention in the crowd … In a dogged way, he ...”

“... of the king and queen. At that point, it was not only the radicals who were still exclaiming with Charles James Fox that the Revolution was the greatest and the best event that ever happened to the world. Pitt himself had declared a few months earlier that ‘the present convulsions of France must, sooner or later, terminate in general harmony … thus ...”

“... the 1590s to get his own Politica removed from the Index, Justus Lipsius agreed to expurgate a passage bemoaning the ill repute into which ‘the Italian reprobate’ had fallen (‘for who is not for flogging the poor man these days?’); he was allowed to keep a remark that dismissed ‘most modern authors’, Machiavelli excepted, as ...”

“... was flourishing: performers like Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Django Reinhardt, Tino Rossi, Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf, abetted by the jazz-inspired youth culture of the zazous, offered the Germans opportunities for rest and recreation that scarcely existed back home. On top of that, the occupying authorities were keen to present themselves as ...”

“... Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced that they were now top dogs. Condescension usually has an anxious motive. Eliot, as Tom Paulin is on hand to say, was working ...”

“... of Selected’ by default. The letters show the opposite to be true. What Graham’s publisher, Charles Monteith of Faber, first suggested in 1978 was a 48-page Selected Poems which would not include any of the early work. Graham wrote back tetchily: ‘My dear Charles, do you not see those early books are coming into ...”

“... for the most part equally addressed. Though the central fictional character of Burr, the narrator, Charles Schuyler, is fairly one-dimensional (his guilt about betraying Burr, for example, is reiterated rather than developed), the novel’s principal historical figures – Burr, Jefferson and Hamilton – are vividly imagined. Burr is the Vidal figure (in the ...”

“... is often referred to.We can see, glancingly, the entrepreneurial nature of his imagination in this passage from a letter to Olwyn (10 February 1963): ‘I drove up to London, ran over a hare (by pure chance – it’s impossible to do it deliberately) sold it to a butcher’s in Holborn and he gave me five bob. I spent it on roses – 4 I got for 5/-, smashed ...”

“... twenty pages. Typically, their form is that of a cascade, one intellectual reference – author or passage – tumbling after another, in a swift, staccato procession, to a sudden end. In one case, we move: from Paolo Sarpi through Augustine, Cicero, Vasari, Winckelmann, Flaxman, Hegel, Heine, Baudelaire, Semper, Scott, Riegl, Feyerabend, Simone Weil and ...”

“... soon after (set during the fifth-century invasion of Rome, it had actual Goths in it), and in 1851 Charles Dickens distinguished him with an invitation to act in his amateur dramatic troupe. Dickens had a starring role, and Collins was to play his valet, but Collins didn’t mind. Soon the two were slumming and probably whoring together. Collins suffered in ...”

“... when it comes to Beyoglu. In 1939, ‘while new government offices were rising in Ankara,’ Charles King writes in Midnight at Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, ‘the Turkish government organised an international design competition to solicit proposals for solving the problem of Istanbul’s future development.’* The winner was Henri ...”

“... senior curatorial opponent inside the gallery, Martin Davies, and his chief enemy outside it, Charles Bell (who regarded Clark as a protégé who had betrayed him), were deeply distrustful of visual analysis, and their ideal of art historical scholarship consigned connoisseurship to a marginal position. There was one great connoisseur in the National ...”

“... polymath Tommaso Campanella, and Thomas Wentworth, the first Earl of Strafford, executed by Charles I in 1641. The nature of Prince’s imaginative involvement in the lives and fates of his personae, to borrow another term used by Pound (whom Prince saluted in a late interview as ‘one of my masters’), is best indicated by a notebook entry made on 5 ...”

“... Charles Howard Hinton​ was a Victorian mathematician and theorist of the fourth dimension, the scandal of whose conviction for bigamy led him to lose his job as a schoolmaster and to exile himself with his family, travelling first to Japan and then to America. Mark Blacklock’s novel shrewdly and even slyly manages to reflect Hinton’s theories without staking the success of the book on them ...”

“... a mountain quarry in British Columbia. Fossils had first been discovered there by a US geologist, Charles Walcott, in 1909 (as Gould convincingly shows, from Walcott’s diaries). In the next eight years, Walcott collected over eighty thousand specimens and deposited them in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He never found the time to work on them as ...”