“... rapidly making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London perambulator who desired no more from life (apart from a decent income) than to savour and capture the variety and energy of city living. Scharf (1788-1860) was an itinerant Bavarian artist whom the fortunes of war ...”

“... the turn of the century can be contained within it: Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin. McElrath and Crisler, however, claim that the naturalist novel has been slighted by scholars in favour of the realist. This was true when they began writing their biography, thirty years ago, but it is not true any ...”

“... DC. Another player made up an occasional fourth man. Isaiah Berlin was happy, at least when Charles (Chip) Bohlen was unavailable, to furnish an urbane ditto to their ruthlessness. Almost as if to show that academics and intellectuals may be tough guys, too – the most lethal temptation to which the contemplative can fall victim – Berlin’s ...”

“... five or ten or twenty quid note. On one side we have a famous dead person: Elizabeth Fry or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, depending on whether it’s a five or ten or twenty. On the other we have a picture of the queen, and just above that the words ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of’, and then the value of the note, and the ...”

“... as shorthand for an unwieldy and dangerous entity created from ill-assorted bits and pieces. As Charles Robinson notes in his new edition of the novel, such confusion set in soon after the book’s first publication in 1818. In October 1823, at a masked ball in Liverpool, a local newspaper reported: ‘Mr Harris, of Preston, personated (we are ...”

“... In some instances, we might wish we knew the questions that sparked his answers. Writing to thank Charles Dodgson for a photographic portrait taken on a visit to Christ Church in January 1861, Faraday offered the following notes on Dodgson’s (lost) queries: The ammonia comes from the cheese evolved by a slow action analogous to decay. You may see the ...”

“... of Poetry of February 1931 had among its contributors Zukofsky, Carl Rakosi (another Wisconsiner), Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert McAlmon, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Whittaker Chambers, a friend of Zukofsky’s from Columbia who, among other things, later translated Bambi from the German. Quite a ...”

“... and rapacity. (Venezuela was the Germans’ principal site of colonisation in the Americas; Charles V gave the Welser family the right to explore and rule a region where the legendary city of El Dorado was thought to lie.) Increasingly, Germans belonged to transnational networks linked by the transfer of money, goods and in some cases power. Jakob ...”

“... symptoms in 1872; Parkinson (James) got his tremor in 1817 and soon thereafter the great anatomist Charles Bell, whom Darwin admired, could be even more precise about ‘his’ disorder – Bell’s palsy – of the seventh cranial nerve; Alzheimer’s disease after Alois of early 20th-century Munich; Gilles de la ...”

“... the power to communicate feeling). Early in the 19th century, François Magendie in France and Charles Bell in Britain established the sensory/motor division of the spinal roots as fundamental to nervous organisation. Experimenters sliced and snipped, but they also looked to philosophy, their theory of the ‘reflex arc’ being suggested by the Cartesian ...”

“... disapproved of Lamb, Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and Charles Buller were old friends, and Irving too, though Irving – now a popular preacher absorbed in miracle cures and speaking in tongues (‘hoo-ing and ha-ing’) – was making Carlyle increasingly uneasy. Mill he had met three years earlier, and the two had ...”

“... only those writers who rate more than two lines in Overy’s index – of the Eugenics Society’s Charles Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard ...”

“... is prominent in the aesthetics of Adorno. More interesting in this context are the observations of Darwin on the physiology of the shudder, recorded in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), which has a chapter headed ‘Surprise– Astonishment–Fear–Horror’. Among the reactions to a suitable stimulus are elevation of the ...”

“... 13 years to write The Tangled Bank, a gruellingly pedantic study of Freud, Marx, James Frazer and Darwin. ‘It ought to make a very handy doorstop,’ Jackson told her parents. In her study of marriages between Victorian writers, Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose suggests that love may be described as the temporary refusal to try to dominate another ...”

“... hundred years or so, I suspect that our time will be described, not as the age of Marx or Freud or Darwin (anyway, one has toppled, one’s shaky on his pins, and the last hasn’t got a chance in hell of surviving the Age of Aquarius), but as the age of the personality. ‘Whatever that was,’ they may well add. For posterity, let me explain about ...”