“... had been at sea for nearly four years, and, as he wrote to his Cambridge mentor, John Henslow, Charles Darwin was increasingly anxious to get home: ‘I look forward with joy and interest to [visiting the Galapagos], both as being somewhat nearer to England, & for the sake of having a good look at an active Volcano.’ He had cause to expect some ...”

“... the numerous misprints do not seriously impede the reader; and it is well illustrated, though I hope no future author will reproduce the ghastly portrait of Gilbert Murray by a relation which the National Portrait Gallery foolishly accepted. The Victorians made the Greeks out to have been far more like themselves than they can have been: by now anthropology ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from wars have catalysed politically progressive advances and even precipitated revolutions. Both Charles I and Louis XVI found themselves entangled in military conflicts their tax systems couldn’t fund. Debts eventually forced both into fatal confrontations: Charles with Parliament in 1640 and Louis with the Estates ...”

“... Everything seemed to find definition that spring – a congruence, a miraculous matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh, green land. The rhythms of perception heightened. The whole enterprise of consciousness accelerated. We were gods that morning ... We marched as far as – where was it? – Glenties! All of 23 ...”

“... Charles Willeford​ is in a category all of his own in the annals of American crime writing. He is neither glamorous nor pulpy; he didn’t write airport fiction and he didn’t write bestsellers with aspirations to literature. He simply wrote crime fiction as though reporting real life. Hoke, a TV series based on the four Hoke Moseley books he wrote in the 1980s, has just been announced in the US; it will star Paul Giamatti, the shlub from Sideways ...”

“... full of useful and unsubstantiated facts, including the information that I shared a birthday with Charles Dickens, the Appalachian banjo-player Dock Boggs, and Julius Caesar. All other authorities seem to agree, however – and it’s only just occurred to me to check this – that Julius Caesar was born in the middle of July. Unhelpfully, few of them say ...”

“... You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’ Nicholl viewed the putative Marlowe, in his opulent slashed doublet, and wondered how he could afford the outfit. He looked at his buttery bills too, and noted when the shoemaker’s son had money to spend; noted when (unless he was starving himself) he was absent from college ...”

“... are of particular interest; and others like them may yet be found. The discovery of the play Sir Charles Grandison, or The Happy Man, the work of Jane Austen and her niece Anna, suggests that there may even yet be additions to the small body of literary manuscripts. There, at present, the documentary record ends; and the biographer must constantly allow for ...”

“... that this is a partial and simplified version of a tortuous argument: an accurate version, I hope. In the book it is backed up by much material on Elizabethan demonology, by minute considerations of the Faust tradition, by some highly speculative but delightful aperçus about the character and circumstances of the shadowy ‘P.F.’. At times Empson can ...”

“... watching the political disarray in the US and the failure of various US security plans, there is hope that the US and its local allies are on the verge of defeat: a sentiment encouraged by the enduring belief on the Islamist wing of the insurgency that with God on their side victory is certain. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government, and the parties and militias on ...”

“... the main feature. When they started out in 1982, the group published a statement of intent: ‘We hope with the involvement of the community to bring alternative news to the general public.’ The audio is lost, but the slides have been digitised and many of them are once again available, via an exhibition at the Hackney Museum (temporarily closed) and an ...”

“... and ameliorative policies become an obligation which no humane society can avoid and still hope to hold its head high in the civilised world. One might naturally take the heyday of this style of thinking to be the period between 1960 and 1980. Levels of economic growth in the early part of the period helped to build up a commitment to the welfare state ...”

“... Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short time he was Percy Lubbock’s secretary at a villa near Lerici. In ‘Class’, he says he tried to pronounce the ‘ah’ of received English, but couldn’t and, because ‘I too visibly shredded his fineness,’ was released from the post ...”

“... According to that view, there was not much wrong with the Church of England until Charles I and Archbishop Laud got their hands on it in the 1620s. Since 1559, the Church, episcopal in structure yet Calvinist in doctrine, had secured a wide base of support and become an instrument of national stability. The Laudians, by their destruction of ...”