“... to hallucinate three or four crabs who followed him around for a year. Each morning, he later told John Gerassi, he would greet them: ‘My little ones, how did you sleep?’ He got used to the crabs, but other sea creatures – molluscs in particular – remained objects of horror. Sliminess had something to do with it. Being and Nothingness (1943) concludes ...”

“... The ghost ought to be a contemporary of the person who sees it, just as Hamlet’s father and Jacob Marley were. The important thing was atmosphere. The setting had to be carefully prepared and evoked. James does this particularly well with the coastal landscape of Suffolk around Aldeburgh – Peter Grimes country. Then it is time for the ‘nicely ...”

“... managed to get home to Boston in 1787 after eight years’ absence. Davis’s near contemporary John Nicol was a romantic like Spavens: ‘I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over and longed to be at sea.’ He volunteered for the navy at Leith in 1776, as soon as he had finished his apprenticeship as a cooper, eager for the chance to visit China. ...”

“... Europe of Hildegard of Bingen, Ramon Llull, Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, Catherine of Siena, John of the Cross, Henry Vaughan, Blaise Pascal, George Fox, Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, William Law, William Blake, William Wordsworth and Bernardette, among tens of thousands of others, needs lessons in spirituality or ...”

“... Then, in 1932, after completing French military service, Balthus made some copies after Jacob Reinhardt’s late 18th-century paintings of Swiss peasant couples in traditional costumes, exaggerating the doll-like quality of the originals: these are the earliest examples of the faux naive manner to which he was attracted throughout his life. Having ...”

“... and reviews: 160 pages followed by a cod-serious bibliography put together by his publisher, John Lane. The opposite approach, resulting in much the same title, was proposed by the very-much-not-dandiacal Gustave Flaubert, then 24, in a letter of 1846 to his friend Maxime Du Camp: ‘Very often, I doubt that I shall ever publish a single line. Wouldn’t ...”

“... histories of politically active men of letters such as William Mitford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Stuart Mill and George Grote.Relating the historical writing of 19th-century liberals and utilitarians to their political battles isn’t a new approach, and conceptually these are some of the least original parts of the book, with Murray content to add ...”

“... work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was tolerated. At one gathering in Florida, one of the team’s managers broke his nose when drunken colleagues were pushing him into a hotel swimming-pool. The team’s pivotal innovation, introduced in December 1997, was a deal they called ...”

“... de Vaugondy that imaginatively laid out both possibilities. By the time of his third voyage, Jacob von Staehlin’s 1773 map of the Northwest coastline, showing Alaska as an island, was supposedly the most accurate chart of the region. The navigators sent to confirm this dangerous cartographical nonsense had harsh things to say about armchair geographers ...”

“... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence ...”

“... good old Bob Boothby is in. Franz Rosenzweig is invisible, but there are four references to Lord John Russell. Forget Kafka, Freud, Durkheim, S.D. Luzzatto, Chagall, Sholom Aleichem and (aside from fleeting mentions) Mendele Moikher Seforim and J.L. Peretz. The last three were the most celebrated writers of the golden age of Yiddish literature: like all the ...”

“... scale of hues, invoking music’s capacity to mould moods and stir emotions. One critic, Georg Jacob Wolf, dismissed Kandinsky’s Composition No. 2 as ‘a colourful hotchpotch’, adding that Kandinsky and his Blaue Reiter disciples ‘create free, pure, high art – so they say. For my part, all their huffing and puffing reminds me of the cackling of a ...”

“... were categorised as M/M. Some prolific pairings: Harry and Draco from Harry Potter, Edward and Jacob from Twilight, King Arthur and Merlin, Captain America and Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (given the portmanteau Johnlock).If the lure of reading fan fiction is clear, the lure of writing it is less obvious. On ...”

“... was ascribed to Satan. In the first systematic treatise devoted to the topic, published in 1637, John Sym, a Puritan, was still able to attribute suicide to ‘the strong impulse, powerfull motions, and command of the Devill’. But natural causes were increasingly being blamed: melancholy, a dysfunction of the hypochondriac organs, folly, a foul ...”

“... to evoke, in unforgettable detail, a moment of seismic historical change. Like the German painter, John Hale has produced a vast and enthralling mosaic. In his new cultural history of Renaissance Europe a sprawling mass of individual scenes, deftly drawn and coloured, capture the pain and the beauty of massive social and cultural change. As with ...”