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“... the 19th-century novel itself is perhaps the most important. As Pew and Silver tell it, Robert LouisStevenson visits Dark at the lighthouse and gets drunkenly loquacious on the subject of man’s shadowy inner self. When Dark discovers an evolutionist’s treasure trove of fossils, he becomes the embodiment ...”

“... sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert LouisStevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium ...”

“... clichés from the Victorian literary bazaar. Dickens and the melodrama supplied fog and gaslight; Stevenson, Wilde and Pater props and accessories: revolver, boxing gloves, jack-knife, briar pipe, jewelled snuffbox, Stradivarius violin, a penchant for recondite chemistry, cocaine, Sarasate and the polyphonic motets of Lassus – and eyelids that are a little ...”

“... and of reconstructions-from-afar is evoked in the novel’s epigraph from the famously unsettled Robert LouisStevenson: The tropics vanish, and meseems that I, From Halkerside, from topmost Allmuir, Or steep Caerketton; dreaming gaze again.                         Songs of Travel This is the ...”

“... multiplying, braced for what Fleming calls ‘a luxurious stretch on Death Row’. But didn’t Robert LouisStevenson at Davos protest at the lack of luxury on Death Row? Shut in a kind of damned Hotel, Discountenanced by God and man; The food? – Sir, you would do as well To fill your belly full of bran. The ...”

“... the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert LouisStevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the ...”

“... But the book also conveys an intriguing sense of the uncertain status of the area. In 1825, when Robert Peel complained that ‘if the national gallery were banished to the neighbourhood of St Giles’s and Russell-square it would much lessen the value of the collection,’ he was implying that Bloomsbury was irredeemably dodgy. It bordered a notorious ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert LouisStevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... streets. One recalls that when writing Sunset Song Gibbon was resident in Welwyn Garden City: like Robert LouisStevenson, he loved his country but had no intention of living or dying there. Twenties London is not Gibbon territory. Nor is irony his natural tone. His best work, hitherto represented by Sunset Song, was ...”

“... lifelong penchant for disguise. We are told that he was obsessed with certain books by Robert LouisStevenson, but no convincing explanations are offered. Why was he so eager to adapt The Suicide Club, Stevenson’s strange tale of a group of men who agree to act as each ...”

“... to do with Pindar. Elsewhere, when a certain grossness is needed, the chance is missed. Both Sir Robert Stapylton (1647) and Henry Fielding (1743) have a go at translating Juvenal’s ferocious account of the profligate Empress Messalina working as a prostitute in a Roman brothel and both suppress Juvenal’s reference to gilded nipples (‘papillis ...”

“... was certainly dryish. On the other hand, Professor Alexander Agassiz (son of the more illustrious Louis) had suggested that rainfall increases as cultivation and building disturb the electrical currents in the surrounding atmosphere, while Hardy W. Campbell, billed in the Milwaukee Road pamphlets as ‘the noted farming expert and inventor of the Campbell ...”

“... the story’s most appealing character, a refugee from the works of Calvino’s favourite writer, Robert LouisStevenson: Dr Trelawney it is who performs the operation. This is a happy ending, but for the story’s youthful narrator it is also the moment of childhood’s end: Dr Trelawney, the tippling medic, leaves on ...”

“... cry out to be tested. It is no surprise that one of many legends about John Hunter suggests that Robert LouisStevenson based Dr Jekyll’s laboratory on Hunter’s house in Leicester Square, Jekyll having ‘bought the house from the heirs of a celebrated surgeon’. Hunter remains a figure as legendary as his ...”

“... a theme taken up from an earlier passage on Chatwin’s troubled and condescending essay about Robert LouisStevenson in the TLS, which Susannah Clapp calls ‘a complicated piece of self-examination and self-dislike’. Identification was a dangerous area for Chatwin. It became disastrous when he thought he saw a ...”