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“... for the wild, the wet and the non-artificial was most developed. Part of the achievement of Keith Thomas’s delightful new book is to explain these paradoxes. His central argument is that these are not real oppositions, but are linked as cause and effect. It was because of the urbanism, the industrialism and the general distancing and control of nature that ...”

“... looking at Rothko. How many other high-powered critical works, I wonder, have Buñuel next to Sir Thomas Browne in the index, or Stan Getz, next to Giotto? Bowie is also something of a barometer for the Proust climate. In an inaugural lecture given in London in 1978, he urged his hearers to read Proust. In an inaugural lecture given in Oxford 15 years ...”

“... muddled, deluded and deluding man. It is Professor Broad, John Taylor, Uri Geller and Fred. As Sir Thomas Browne wrote in Religio Medici, ‘we carry within us the wonders we seek without; all Africa and her prodigies are within ...”

“... out complex arrangements of the most exotic trees and plants. Like his Norfolk contemporary Sir Thomas Browne, he admired the fact that a tree could ‘generate its like without violation of Virginity’. But he was no Swampy or tree-hugger. His plans for giant plantations of trees had a military and industrial purpose: they were eventually to be ...”

“... his own professional life, with a bookish veneer that places them somewhere between Borges and Sir Thomas Browne. In one of his essays, ‘Bologna, the Learned’ (in Suspended Animation, 1995), he reminds us of the popularity from the 14th century onwards of public dissections, which were advertised in Latin on the columns of the Archiginnasio days ...”

“... of Disputa intorno (Basel, 1561), and ‘that villain and secretary of hell’ (according to Thomas Browne) who converted to all three religions in turn, before becoming (in Kenelm Digby’s words) a ‘developed and manifest atheist’. De tribus didn’t need to exist to do its work: attribution alone was a slander. The condemnations were ...”

“... she was already playing with myth. In this case she used the legend, as recounted by the antiquary Thomas Browne, that the unicorn can be caught only if he is lured by a virgin left alone in a wood. Carter draws the narrative out from the flattened plane of tapestry it usually inhabits, animating it with one of her first big girls, one who is ‘raw and ...”

“... the frame he wanted them to occupy. He could no more stop trying to visualise the tesseract than Thomas Browne could stop seeing quincunxes. If Blacklock can risk pulling back from Hinton’s theories, the reason must be not that they are hopelessly alien but that they are deeply embedded in the ordinary experience of reading. If the requirement for ...”

“... Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered Antwerp, drained, estranged from ...”

“... nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the ...”

“... a revolution, but in his amiable ordinariness he was a most unlikely candidate for genius. Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volume biography of Darwin takes as its epigraph a line from The Woman in White: ‘We don’t want genius in this country, unless it is accompanied by respectability.’ Darwin was a genius tailor-made to Victorian measure, a genius of ...”

“... narratives that touch such weathered stones of deep cultural time as Democritus and Lucretius, Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, conduces me, at least, to conviction: I can think of only a handful of films that have had the profound impact on me that Keiller’s London did when I first saw it in the cinema. With its acute intercuts of London’s ...”

“... our faces.’ Our responses to illness, he says, are expressions of our nature, and, quoting Sir Thomas Browne, ‘things cannot get out of their natures.’ He puts this case to counter modern medicine’s inclination to reduce disease to the separate and mechanical, and it is a case that always needs reiterating, but his commitment to the notion that ...”

“... ephemeral. Ammons listens to syllables as though he were diagnosing the workings of matter. ‘Sir Thomas Browne uses the word as “fictile vessels”, meaning clay,’ he wrote to a friend in 1954, ‘very interesting word; the first syllable hard, the second oozing over into a thin oilyness.’ This slippage from solid to liquid is translated into ...”

“... financial pressures and a hail of deadlines. The looming Frankfurt Book Fair caused such stress in Thomas Platter’s printing house in 1536 that Platter’s partner Balthasar Ruch attacked him with a ‘heavy pine board’ while Platter was correcting proofs. We sense this mix of industry and panic, of erudition and hard graft, in a Moses Thym engraving from ...”