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“... boundless humdrum detail, is one of the great revolutionary conceptions in human history, which Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self claims as Christian in inspiration. The modern equivalent of Moll Flanders in this respect is EastEnders. Auerbach’s Mimesis, one of the great works of literary scholarship, was written between 1942 and 1945 in ...”

“... Arabs verging on the sacrosanct, and in Arabia one of the most important rights is the right of passage. The Islamic era begins with a journey – that of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to al-Madinah; pilgrimage is one of the Pillars of Islam; sabil Allah, the Road of God, is shorthand for all the exertions expected of a good Muslim. At first glance, this ...”

“... cast of characters. For most of the previous century, serial writers had co-ordinated the passage of time within their novels to the succession of weekly or monthly issues in which installments appeared: the Pickwick Papers scheduled a love plot to coincide with Valentine’s Day, as soap operas do now. The Holmes stones reject this strategy. Although ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... park – unprecedented behaviour for the ground-loving norvegicus. My first thought on reading the passage was: pity the squirrels. As for the head exterminator, he got on a walkie-talkie and shouted: ‘Hey, Rick! There’s rats in the goddam trees!’ Rats – fast, tireless runners – will also make use of public transport. Subway workers have reported ...”

“... characters – Aaron Burr and the Emperor Julian – as well as in his satires. In Burr, Charles Schuyler, a character invented by Vidal to be this vice president’s biographer, says his subject is ‘a man of perfect charm and fascination. A monster, in short.’ Not unlike the novel’s author. ‘I suspect Cromwell was right,’ Vice President ...”

“... of Buckminster Fuller as well as by the more practical Californian modernism of Richard Neutra, Charles and Ray Eames, and other designers of the Case Study Houses in Los Angeles. However, by the late 1970s Piano, Rogers and Foster had diverged. Piano was never so Pop as Rogers nor so high-tech as Foster, and his signature device came to differ as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around ...”

“... use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of evil in childhood, The Night of the Hunter. He died in 1955, of a heart attack, aged 45, leaving behind several manuscript chapters of an autobiographical novel, A ...”

“... mistaking the cutter for a North Vietnamese patrol boat, launched a withering attack. In a passage which captures the lunacy of the war and the terror America’s war machine visited on the Vietnamese every day for a decade, Page describes the crew’s desperate and futile attempt to identify their boat, bring the attack to a halt and save ...”

“... is still dissection. That first cut into the great muscles of the back is as epochal a rite of passage as any we know. No surface, no depth of the earth is proportionately so dense with the names of its eponymous explorers as the human body. Over four centuries its every structure – large and small – was the object of exposure, probing, knowing and ...”

“... proved that this was not the case. This may turn out to be Philip Roth’s least favourite passage in the book (if and when he reads it), with its proof that Pierpont, however much she admires the humour he sets down on his pages, can’t notate it herself. Nothing more certainly sours a marriage, above all a marriage of minds, than treading on a ...”