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“... of America’s vigorous adolescence as an economic power and a dark premonition of its destiny. Clare Spark is a devotee of Ahab the fallen angel. She believes that Ishmael has been puffed at the expense of Ahab, largely because Ahab’s free spirit is too anti-social. She objects especially to the idea that he is a one-legged Führer hobbling up and ...”

“... mother and a West Indian father, must pass as Black to enter Harlem society. In Passing (1929), Clare Kendry, also the product of an interracial relationship, passes as white to marry well. What sets Larsen’s novels apart from other such narratives – James Weldon-Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), for example – is their resistance ...”

“... she cannot feel his artistic nature. Mulready was Irish. The family came from Ennis, County Clare. They settled in London when he was a boy. Mulready was an early reader, and learnt Latin and French: later in life he taught himself Greek and German. He could draw, and was probably in the Royal Academy schools by the age of 13. This would be in 1799 or ...”

“... Cos(au)way for a Man in Miniature, makes plain the social anxieties a prominent woman could spark. A giant Maria Cosway looks down on her tiny husband, the Academician Richard Cosway, smuggled like a baby in the voluminous folds of her dress (there were sneers that Cosway had been carried by his wife’s fame). John Wolcot, alias Peter Pindar, told the ...”

“... love and guilt towards his daughter is caught in his ominously Ibsenite comment that ‘whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and has kindled a fire in her brain.’ Whether the fire is genius or madness is left unspoken. ‘Tell him I am a crossword puzzle,’ Lucia said to a visitor to the asylum, ‘and if he does not mind seeing ...”

“... too many tears’ was accompanied by a fascination with the darker poetry of Lermontov and John Clare. These days, ‘needless to say, I can hardly bear to read either’, but the reason for all this, the ‘events and moods’ that provoked it eludes her. It isn’t the specifics that have gone. As well as the poems she has a clear picture of ...”

“... of consciousness (and its termination), the illusion of selfhood and the glum fact that minus the spark of life we’re just meat. It’s perplexing – but also sobering and, viewed through Campbell’s sympathetic lens, uplifting.Her episodes tend towards the clinical or the macabre, though the distinction blurs as we grow more familiar with the dead. Her ...”

“... he wrote, had ‘succeeded in keeping alight the flame of Shakespeare’. ‘We wish to awake the spark of enthusiasm in the minds of youth,’ he wrote of his proposed torchlight parades. ‘We wish to throw the utmost light upon the truth, and beauty, and enduring sanity of Shakespeare’s works, that they may blaze as a beacon in the dark.’A.K. was ...”