“... a private reason, rendering a long Voyage and absence particularly painful to me’ (another passage hitherto deleted), it’s surely the separation from Ellen that he fears. (His pull in America is illustrated by the £1000 he was paid by a New York editor for the short story ‘Hunted Down’ – an unsought offer he found too handsome to refuse.) In ...”

“... as a royal adviser said, ‘to be put in a new romanso’ – when the future Charles I and his father James I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a ...”

“... I belonged to the category he hated and feared. Yes, the moment of coming out, cardinal rite of passage in gay life, though of course the term ‘rite of passage’ can cover anything from bar mitzvah to auto-da-fé. I had already told my mother, not making a very good job of it. Rose-tinted spectacles is the rule when ...”

“... is more drawn to an earlier episode in Paris two months earlier. The proclivities of King Charles IX were gratified at a great feast marked by ‘an exceptionally vile pièce de resistance in which a bag full of live cats and a fox was suspended thirty feet up over a huge bonfire, until the flames pulled the screaming mass down’. To that episode, in ...”

“... that subject, probably from personal experience. In an early thriller called ‘At the End of the Passage’, which is about officials under stress in an Indian heatwave, one of them finds himself sitting at the table as he enters his house, and the vision gets up and departs hastily. Visions have a special and decidedly creepy status in the stories, and seem ...”

“... kill him. This is except for the boxthorn tree, which is the tree of the Jews.’ Although the passage above comes from a hadith of the Prophet that is not recognised by all Muslims, its message is clear: defeat of the Jews is a religious priority. However, other epochs in Muslim history, when the umma’s existence was not threatened, show that ...”

“... New York psychoanalytic community and begins living an ordinary satanic life under a new name, Dr Charles R. Hulbeck. ‘“And so as a doctor I was a success,” he wrote in 1969, five years before he died, “and as a dadaist (the thing closest to my heart) I was a failure.”’ But Marcus turns on this regretful reminiscence and exposes its shameless and ...”

“... Five of the 12 essayists – Michael Dummett, P.F. Strawson, David Pears, D.M. Armstrong and Charles Taylor – are concerned with these or with closely related questions. Collectively – taken together with those earlier writings of Ayer on which these essays are a commentary and with Ayer’s reply at the end of this book – they constitute an ...”

“... of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later recalled the Harlem Renaissance as ‘that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American ...”

“... his family but also to literary friends from Newport and Boston such as Thomas Sergeant Perry and Charles Eliot Norton. To Norton on Germans, for example: ‘Such men – such women – such children! … Even the comparatively good-looking ones suffer from the ugliness of the others & are injured by the hideous contagion.’ To his brother William on ...”

“... clerics of the time. Notwithstanding this diversion, English scientific triumphs lead logically to Charles Lyell and the foundation of the modern science of geology, eventually seeing off the Church in the Huxley/Wilberforce debate that set Darwinism on its inexorable course. Rudwick demolishes this travesty of history. He shows that Hutton’s ...”

“... Chatterton could ‘do’ any poet from Chaucer to the recently dead Charles Churchill; and after his own death poets ‘did’ him. This stanza from ‘Bristowe Tragedie or the Dethe of Syr Charles Bawdin’, is a blend of the Spenserian antique and ballad poetry, a combination which uses phrases that are heard again in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: How dydd I know thatt ev’ry darte Thatt cutte the airie waie Mighte nott fynde a passage to my harte And close myne eyes for aie? ‘Half the poetry of the 18th century is probably written by him,’ a character says in Peter Ackroyd’s novel Chatterton ...”

“... an environmentalist, swashbuckler or scientist, that he never expected to navigate the Northwest Passage on a research vessel or concern himself with the bioaccumulation of toxins in the food chain. The result is a comprehensive book about how we’ve filled the seas with plastic by a man who writes as if he’s been swept up, like one of the spilled ...”

“... dagger, sometimes he makes careful little drawings of hands, each with a finger pointed towards a passage of text he wishes to mark out. Most precious of all to him are his notebooks, in which he takes down the details of cases he has seen: hundreds of pages written and overwritten in his tiny writing.Perhaps the most striking instance of the blurring of fact ...”

“... of State and not to have to write plays – just make history. And no Czechoslovak equivalent of Charles Osborne snapping at your ankles complaining that the history you’re making falls between every possible stool, or some Prague Steven Berkoff snarling that it’s not the kind of history that’s worth making anyway. I wonder whether Havel has lots of ...”