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“... incapable of writing badly, so their reader has other compensations. A specially interesting man, Charles Ritchie, the great friend of Elizabeth Bowen, found in his diary the compensation for his complete failure to be ‘a writer’. Young diarists usually show off. Evelyn Waugh records in 1956 that in the hope of ...”

“... of self-annihilation as the price of knowledge – knowledge about nature, society and identity. Charles Darwin and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the novel of that title, the aesthete Walter Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist Harriet Martineau and Dickens’s John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend – all these Victorians, real ...”

“... Soon​ after firing James Comey, Donald Trump baited the former FBI director. ‘Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!’ Trump tweeted. Comey replied a month later, while testifying before the Senate intelligence committee. ‘Lordy,’ he said, ‘I hope there are tapes ...”

“... of psychic instability. Edward entered a home for the insane at 19 and died there 60 years later, Charles went in for opium, Arthur for alcohol. Septimus would introduce himself to a stranger by rising from the hearthrug where he had been lying, extending a languid hand, and saying: ‘I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.’ The daughters were ...”

“... this saga. The cover of The Fellowship flourishes the names of two of them – Owen Barfield and Charles Williams – alongside those of Tolkien and Lewis. Barfield had become friends with Lewis when they were undergraduates, and was later a frequent companion on his walking tours of rural England and his favourite antagonist in debates. Barfield’s chief ...”

“... bricolage and intertextuality. Their cases are analysed along with that of the Victorian novelist Charles Reade, and the American writer Jacob Epstein, whose first novel, Wild Oats (1979), included a number of sentences taken straight from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. These plagiarists, he found, nearly always used the notebook defence: they’d copied ...”

“... be misdiagnosed, delaying identification of the problem and the start of control measures. In 1973 Charles Rondle was conducting research on smallpox at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, using techniques he had learned some years before while working for Allan Downie in Liverpool. The virus was being grown in fertile hens’ eggs. One of the ...”

“... Journal of Photography made by Conan Doyle between 1881 and 1885, and the editors express the hope that it will appeal to those ‘with an interest ... in his famous creation, Sherlock Holmes’. There is not the slightest reason why it should do anything of the kind. Holmes himself, indeed, might have been interested in the piece called ‘A Few ...”

“... and works, as Viljoen already knew. Ruskin’s literary executors, led by Viljoen’s compatriot Charles Eliot Norton, had burnt all that they could find that related to Rose or had been written by her. The diary must have escaped their bonfire, but in the event the manuscript was to disappear again in a year or two. Viljoen retained her transcript. As far ...”

“... have helped to further the adventures of James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves, Billy Bunter and Charles Pooter; not forgetting, from an earlier age, Flashman and Rochester’s mad wife. In a class of their own come the surrogate writers who are authorised to enrich the leftovers of a dead storyteller. The late, prolific Alistair MacLean (‘Ach, any idiot ...”

“... not only to wrest control of the sickroom from Lord Lovelace and to banish unorthodox friends like Charles Babbage, but to extort the dying woman’s confession of adultery with a neighbour, thereby permanently alienating the married couple. Though Lovelace began an idealised account of the courage with which his wife confronted her suffering, the revelation ...”

“... Ellen (note her initials), was serially unfaithful: in other words, he’s a sprightly updating of Charles Bovary, however much he would resist the comparison. In his defence, Braithwaite might point out that ‘Charles n’était pas de ceux qui descendent au fond des choses,’ while he is determined to get to the bottom ...”

“... experience in that area,’ a fellow Republican says of the testimony of Nixon’s thuggish aide, Charles Colson (post-Watergate, an evangelical minister). Obfuscation was second nature – to the very end. In his resignation speech, Nixon, wily as ever, seemed to suggest that he was stepping down because he had lost the support of Congress. This puzzles ...”

“... glimpses of them in the houses of wealthier, older friends. They had names such as Hamish or Charles, wore cavalry twill trousers, blazers and Viyella shirts. Having some artisan in Lima sculpt a block of cocaine into a likeness of an Inca god then lacquer it against detection by Customs and Excise was a wizard wheeze for these dashing chaps, who, while ...”

“... concerns the great dead, she became known in the 1980s as a champion of the language poets: Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Bruce Andrews and perhaps a dozen others, who first published during the 1970s in a brace of little magazines, one of which bore the all too catchy name ...”