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“... of an empire closed entirely to outsiders – or as a cheerful romp in the tradition of Dumas and Stevenson. In the event, it was both and neither. And this, I think, is Mitchell’s basic weakness. When Calvino wrote If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, in which the reader picks up ten novels in turn, each written in a different style, it was a ...”

“... Shelley ménage – in a book that also explores his biographical ‘intimacy’ with Robert Louis Stevenson, Gérard de Nerval and Mary Shelley’s remarkable mother Mary Wollstonecraft – that occasions the reflection. There is something about ‘the Shelley circle’, and particularly its bizarre life abroad, that produces this effect. At its most ...”

“... Gibbons, which he sometimes wore to answer the door, and a clock that Henry VIII had given to Anne Boleyn. His house was open to visitors if they applied for tickets and Walpole would show them round himself. What it all meant, however, was less easy to see. ‘Horrie’ was described by one of his many detractors as a man who wore ‘mask within ...”

“... modern analytic philosophers. For according to both Aristotle and such philosophers – Ayer and Stevenson are two distinguished examples – discerning the relevant facts is, as it were, a preliminary task which has to be completed before an evaluative judgment or choice is made. According to Weil and Murdoch, the central moral task often just is learning ...”

“... die!’ The ghosts are those of the people we know as the Duke of Clarence, Prince Edward, Queen Anne and others. The movie is Richard III, although the man in the novel doesn’t know this, since he has caught only part of the film on television, and the time is the eve of the battle of Bosworth Field. The toy planes and the movie run through the novel like ...”

“... answers) by writing. At first she reads books by men. Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘that man who wrote Heart of Darkness, whose name escapes me’.I hardly ever saw so much as a glimpse of myself in any of their books and I didn’t care to. I didn’t want to exist in books. I liked how the men talked to other men and I liked the ...”

“... who appear to have been surprised into poetry. The surprise is frequently an unpleasant one. Anne Bradstreet writes on the fire which destroyed her house, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, ‘On Himself, upon Hearing What Was His Sentence’. All three discover consolation in a faith which enables Graham to relish the thought of his own execution: Open ...”

“... following the publication of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson earned £5000 a year for a few years. But he was easily surpassed by Rider Haggard, ‘perhaps the country’s best-paid writer between 1887 and 1894, when his earnings exceeded £10,000 annually’. His income started to fall away thereafter, but later ...”

“... was done with a nurse’s blue pencil on the flyleaf of a volume of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson.‘These drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in ...”

“... grown out of such silliness, another notable casualty of which was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a bore. I don’t quite spill ...”

“... Sisters and defending lesbian fiction. Eliot isn’t a scintillating letter-writer like Keats or Stevenson, but sometimes readers are led back to the poetry from fresh angles – and not least from the ‘cousin of Colonel Heneage’ angle. It’s typical that he remembered Colonel Heneage’s name, because Eliot, so aware of his own family name and ...”

“... the traditional air ‘The Old Head of Dennis’, to which it was set by the Dublin composer John Stevenson. But the words too were responsible for the song’s great appeal: There is not in the wide world a valley so sweet As that vale in whose bosom the bright waters meet; Oh! the last rays of feeling and life must depart, Ere the bloom of that valley shall ...”

“... he started a farm in Berkshire, but my mother, Elsie, who was born in 1901, her family was called Stevenson, and they had worked a farm in Fletching since 1760.’ All his family were involved in farming one way or another: his older brother, now dead, owned a farm in Hampshire; his younger brother works for an agricultural machinery business in Vancouver ...”