“... any tomb-robbing researcher. They will themselves incinerate mountains of correspondence (as did Dickens) or enjoin survivors to do it for them (like Auden). They will dictate to puppet biographers the ‘true’ story of their lives (like Hardy or Nabokov). The most determined will arrange to disappear from the face of the earth, like Thomas Pynchon, a ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... unfinished, as its title implies, at the author’s death), but was more flattered when Dickens posthumously invited him to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The exchange was recorded in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research:   I shall be honoured, Mr Dickens.   ...”

“... Lords’ appointed for life: Lord Darwin, Lord Bentham, Lord Brunel and above all Lord Babbage. Charles Babbage really lived, of course (though not as a Lord), and really invented merit lordship, the computer, and many other improvements in mechanism. All one needs to accept, to set this novel going, is that Babbage’s genius should be properly recognised ...”

“... at all: in other words, that the notion of a sustained Parliamentary opposition to James I and Charles I, leading inevitably to a military conflict fought over constitutional principles, cannot be sustained. Indeed, they look with deep suspicion at any notion of inevitability. They admit that the Crown was faced with serious problems – of religious ...”

“... when even a British schoolboy would be considered grossly uneducated if he had never heard of Dickens. The publication of the first volume (of three) of Maxwell’s scientific papers and letters gives us a rare opportunity to acquaint ourselves with some of the thought processes of this extraordinary man in his formative years. He was almost unbelievably ...”

“... verse-drama, The Cenci, written in 1819. Other writers drawn to the subject include Stendhal, Dickens, Artaud and Alberto Moravia. The appeal of the story is partly lurid – a pungent mix of Renaissance sex and violence; a sense of dark deeds behind the closed doors of a prominent Roman family. It affords a glimpse, in Shelley’s words, of ‘the most ...”

“... best friend’s wife (probably unadulterously), got involved in a series of bad-tempered rows with Dickens and his bohemian hangers-on. Many authors’ cupboards contain worse. His daughter honoured his last testament as best she could. But in the biographical vacuum gossip festered into slander. Letters came onto the market, some of them detailing ...”

“... a whistle, but even shriller – I see Oliver Twist among A heaping of office ledgers. Go ask Charles Dickens this, How it was in London then: The old City with Dombey’s office, The yellow waters of the Thames. There is a salubrious élan about much of the book, and the fact that this is indeed a book, not just a selection of the significant ...”

“... rather confusingly calls her subject, was a different kind of writer from Jane Austen, more like Dickens or even Hardy. She should be judged on all her works, and more on the plays and later novels than on Evelina and the Journals. Violence, anxiety, grotesque farce and brutal jokes pervade her works. ‘The search for ...”

“... still set our teeth on edge like bad table manners. Hensher is a terrific reader who can open up Dickens like a plate of gleaming oysters, setting out the best passages about handwriting from Nicholas Nickleby to Great Expectations. He notes the erotic seethings that illegible handwriting occasions in Proust, and his disdain for a decipherable hand in the ...”

“... and his painter characters (Barnby and Deacon) are a good deal more convincing than Waugh’s Charles Ryder. You can guess at Ryder’s style (something of Felix Kelly’s romantic architectural portraits, say, or Rex Whistler’s decorations) but you can’t easily imagine him actually putting brush to canvas. Among other odds, ends and memorabilia in ...”

“... this. Kipling’s genius, or ‘daemon’ as he called it, was certainly many-voiced like that of Dickens: but in both writers these voices seem to come from inside things and people, rather than giving an accurate imitation of acoustic flavour. No one ever spoke like Mrs Gamp, which is why Mrs Gamp speaks so authoritatively for something inside so many ...”

“... suffrage, if not in votes for women as well. These dissenters from orthodoxy were not followers of Charles Bradlaugh or even Chartists, but simply the Victorian working class. All the evidence suggests that the average secular and democratic British citizen of the late 20th century, visiting the 19th century in a time machine, would find a congenial atmosphere ...”

“... were pleasantly surprised by the intellectual vitality of the region, particularly given that Dickens had avoided the South entirely during his famous American visit of 1842. (Dickens had been advised by Henry Clay not to traverse the ‘dismal swamp’ between Washington and Charleston; O’Brien notes that the ...”