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“... just as afterwards solipsists, narcissists and eccentrics were all to abound, from Donne and Sir Thomas Browne through to Rousseau and Timothy Leary. But so many of them were egomaniacs, self-hating, self-exiled, possessed by daemons. Montaigne, by contrast, taught that the soul should be at home with the self – neither beast nor angel, but ...”

“... me shins. Your hand is too cold for all and aught.’ According to the book’s epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne, the considering man ‘may conceive himself in some manner to have lived from the beginning of the world’, so that the relationship between tale and teller appears in different styles and places. In this way we get, appropriately, some ...”

“... Columbus, gesturing knowingly towards the dissected corpse, as if to reinforce the words of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.’ Echoes of the notion that psychological probing resembles the work of the dissecting scalpel appear in the titles of widely read works such as ...”

“... of romantic awe, in a prose that will suddenly, effortlessly, fall into the very cadences of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘In Homer’s time, a King could go out to plough his land and build his bed of giant timbers.’ Her prose is usually ravishing, sometimes breathtaking. The entire section titled ‘Pasticceria and the Apulian Baroque’ is composed ...”

“... the Sphinx is the offspring of Typhon the dragon and the half-snake, half-nymph, Echidna. Sir Thomas Browne calls them ‘Poetical Animals . . . things of no existence’, and puzzles over the Mosaic prohibition on eating the flesh of griffins. (Ruskin later pronounced on the nature of true griffins versus false ones, and appended illustrations of ...”

“... her terrifying talk about damnation. It so happened, however, that one day Stevenson’s father Thomas came on a document drawn up by Louis and his friends – it was the constitution of a secret society known as the ‘L.J.R.’ – calling for the abolition of the House of Lords and a rejection of the doctrines of the Established Church. It caused him to ...”

“... they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was considering the dietary prohibitions in the Bible, he was puzzled that griffins were listed, commenting that griffins were ‘Poetical Animals, and things of no existence’. The combination of eagle and lion was, he ...”

“... Marten could subvert protest at radical measures in the Commons by laughter, and friends like Thomas Chaloner and Thomas May shared his sceptical wit. To denounce them as libertines was to become a stock tactic for conservatives anxious to show where republicanism ended up; Aubrey himself disliked this tactic, and felt ...”

“... not as a nation, but as a race. The vision of Daniel Defoe pauses at one point to paraphrase Sir Thomas Browne, though it takes great freedom with his meaning: ‘When the bones of King Arthur were digged up, the race beheld some original of themselves; so can we erect and proclaim our birth upon the pillars of our forefathers.’ To be ...”

“... Among the list of influences he cites are the Goncourt brothers, Emily Brontë, Hardy, Tolstoy and Thomas Browne. He’s quick to see the merits of Joyce, praising Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for its truth-telling and enviously tracking the progress of Ulysses when it is serialised in the Little Review: ‘Damn! It’s all my idea, the technique ...”

“... book on Some Religious Elements in English Literature and a biography of Milton. Like her ancestor Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose History of England was intended to appeal to the common reader (and particularly to women), she disliked intellectual snobbery. In ‘Parties’ she surveys the foibles of the literary world represented at a gathering: the ...”

“... be in with a chance in the ‘Best Modernist Title’ category. The parallax effect is defined by Thomas Browne in the poem’s epigraph: ‘Many things are known as some are seen, that is by Paralaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper being.’ As an optical metaphor, ‘paralaxis’ has huge potential for the poet interested in the ...”

“... ecclesiastical tradition. The high point was reached more than three hundred years ago when Sir Thomas Browne published his Religio Medici, and Johnson’s indebtedness to this tradition is seen best in his borrowing of two habits common to such books: the sarcastic ridiculing of all secular opposition and a pious refusal to believe that atheism really ...”

“... Arcadia. Shakespeare complete. Raleigh’s History of the World. Bacon complete. The Bible. Sir Thomas Browne complete. Milton, including the prose works. Cowley, Waller and Denham. Dryden, including the prose works and the translations. Samuel Butler complete. Pope complete, including the Iliad and the Odyssey. Addison complete. Steele complete. Swift ...”

“... really turn to the church? At moments like this I wanted to demand that he be more like his hero Thomas Browne. (Kalanithi is buried with a copy of Religio Medici.) The great attraction of Browne’s text is that it – like Montaigne’s Essays – reveals worlds within the writer himself. ‘There are many pieces in ...”