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“... identified with a branch of literature which was hardly his first choice, but such is publishing. Charles Boon, a brewery worker’s son who left school at 12 (‘the original wide boy’, according to his daughter Dinah) was the go-getter who eventually concentrated on light romantic fiction. He did not lack rivals. The Northcliffe fiction factories were ...”

“... Failing to induce his girl to provide it, he finds a more eager partner in a fellow officer called Charles Manning. The encounter is graphically described. Here, as in all her work, Barker insists that the intellectual and moral issues which she writes about are inescapably grounded in the life of the body – ‘because this mass of nerve and blood and muscle ...”

“... Logorrhoea:​ Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised soliloquies. The one I remember best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish) and the song ‘Penny Lane ...”

“... memories of childhood, and his now ageing parents so lightly side by side. ‘One perception,’ Charles Olson decreed in ‘Projective Verse’ in 1950, ‘must immediately and directly lead to a further perception.’ Kleinzahler’s poetry abides by this tenet, but he softens and smoothes the connections so that we hardly notice them being ...”

“... When Les Murray writes, ‘the white-faced heron hides in the drain with her spear,’ or when Allen Curnow writes, ‘the small wind instruments in the herons’ throats / play an incorrigible music,’ there is in each case the shock of something quite particular, and of language forced to find a way of matching it. Someone is forgetting himself and ...”

“... of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she converts ...”

“... paranoia was fulfilled.’ Miss Didion reached her own breaking-point almost exactly a year before Charles Manson reached his. Alerted by an attack of nausea and vertigo (and such an attack ‘does not now seem to [her] an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968’), Miss Didion enrolled as a private outpatient of the psychiatric clinic at St John’s ...”

“... In​ the Beat constellation, Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and Naked Lunch (1959); Brion Gysin, inventor of the cut-up technique, is still visible on a clear night. But the beautiful Lucien Carr, an Alain Delon lookalike drawn into the Beat circle by a smitten scoutmaster who stalked him across America until Carr pulled out a knife and killed him in New York, no longer emits much light ...”

“... Why is it,’ asks the mathematician John Allen Paulos in his book about the pitfalls of innumeracy, ‘that a lottery ticket with the numbers 2 13 17 20 29 36 is for most people far preferable to one with the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 6?’ It is not an easy question to answer. All lotteries, after all, rely on a recognition by those who participate in them that the winning numbers are chosen at random, if only so that the participants can feel that their numbers have as good a chance of coming up as any others ...”

“... County lists and herbarium sheets were searched for older records. One lesson of David Elliston Allen’s earlier book The Naturalist in Britain was that this kind of disciplined collaboration can get good scientific work out of the essentially inefficient engine of amateur natural history. There is more than one reason for climbing such Everests of ...”

“... and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold. That ...”

“... of the professional scientist. In his Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage dismissed the amateur tradition of science as wholly inadequate to the serious advancement of scientific knowledge. As young men now applied themselves to the study of law, he argued, future scientists must devote themselves to the mastery of ...”

“... Linnen – argenterie Goods – MSS!!! All!’ When she reached Brussels, she wrote to her brother Charles: ‘Unless some speedy happy turn takes place, in public affairs here, we have lost all we possessed in France.’ There was, from her point of view, a happy turn: the Battle of Waterloo. As before in her life, she was about to become a witness to ...”

“... I know you.’ Hoover: ‘I feel like I know you too.’ A few moments later, the visitor met Allen Dulles, the director of the CIA. ‘You, Mr Chairman, may have seen some of my intelligence reports from time to time,’ Dulles said, smiling. ‘I believe we get the same reports,’ Khrushchev replied. ‘And probably from the same ...”

“... are stored in an old safe and inside them are the figures for Beau Brummell, the younger Pitt, Charles James Fox and hundreds of others. It seems to me, after a cursory inspection, that the average weight of the Englishmen listed in these two books increased by about twenty pounds over a hundred-year period. In July 1807, Byron, wearing only his ...”