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“... on his own, magically, at precisely the words that Cervantes uses. Borges’s narrator quotes a passage from Cervantes, followed by one from Menard. The quotations are ‘verbally identical’, and the sight of them on the page is already funny and disturbing enough, but Borges’s finest touch is more discreet, and truly dizzying. Having commented on the ...”

“... object or occasion. Not that we don’t enjoy some of these essays, especially time-honoured ones: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their stage representation is as delicious as it is dated. Yet unlike Lamb’s piece, the contemporary critical essay often demands a knowledge that is highly specialised, and uses a vocabulary drawn from ...”

“... took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated Baxter’s useful skill with ...”

“... of America are located in the writings, in turn, of Frances Trollope, Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens (gathered in Chapter Two under the heading ‘Institutional America’), Oscar Wilde and Rupert Brooke (‘Aesthetic America’), Kipling and R.L. Stevenson (‘Epic (and Chivalric) America’), H.G. Wells (‘Futuristic America’), D.H. Lawrence ...”

“... companion of the Princess Ghika at the Villa Gamberaia up in Settignano. The philosopher, Charles Strong, his college mate, who had married a Rockefeller daughter, showed up.’ It’s like watching the suitcases rotate in an international airport. Miss Blood comes round again a hundred pages and a half a dozen years later, writing to Gertrude Stein ...”

“... more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years earlier by the actor Charles Macklin. Compared to his later tour de force in this line, however, these are mere squibs. When Samuel Ireland, unwitting dupe of his 19-year-old son William Henry, published Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William ...”

“... Evidence Act (1984), which laid down strict rules for the treatment of suspects. Before its passage, confessions could be extracted by any means necessary, so long as any injuries inflicted weren’t too obvious. There were no tape or video recordings, no lawyer present, just police officers. The suspects who confessed claimed they did so after being ...”

“... that it derives directly from an abridged version of the novel prepared by the London bookseller Charles Cooke in 1811. Cooke, or his hack, went through the ‘eighth’ edition rewriting phrases that appeared too colloquial or idiomatic and simplifying sentences that rambled or changed direction. He deleted notionally superfluous words and phrases ...”

“... present edition of his letters more than bears him out. Horne calls attention to a characteristic passage from one of the letters to Ward quoted earlier, in which James finds himself irresistibly drawn forward by all he wants to convey: But there is too much to say about these things – & I am writing too much – & yet haven’t said ½ I want to ...”

“... The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child vagrant. Global-franchise tramp. Swiss domiciled millionaire guardian of his own archive. Author of a myth-making autobiography exploiting the nexus of these streets. The fable of Chaplin’s ...”

“... one of the few painters to make a success of fresco in his murals for the Robing Room, warned Charles Cope, who was just starting work on the House of Lords, that ‘when you are about to paint a sky 17 feet long by some four or five broad, I don’t advise you to have a Prince looking in upon you every ten minutes or so – or when you are going to trace ...”

“... a get well soon letter from Blair, when he (Richards) fell out of his tree. Is it possible the passage has been taken out on its way from publication in the US? Strange because not much else has, certainly not the American spelling, or the careful explanation of anything even faintly British, along with dogged translations of rhyming slang no one has ...”

“... decades’ worth of precious tat at the old place last month was hugely stressful, a Major Life Passage and all that. One’s pale, vine-withered, all-too-sensitive skin took notice. Nor did Blakey help matters when she said: Well, that’s how it started with my father. (We’re still legally married, btw; the ban on same-sex marriage voted in in the ...”

“... that’s not the whole story, or indeed the most interesting part of it. In Chapter 13 comes the passage I have already mentioned, in which Connie, having dined with her husband and roundly condemned him in her own mind as a dead fish of a gentleman with a celluloid soul, puts on ‘rubber tennis-shoes, and then a light coat’, and slips out of the house to ...”

“... his writings he could be eloquent about man’s desolation in an indifferent universe. The famous passage in his Foundations of Belief still makes you shiver: Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a ...”