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“... Analects, ‘it benefits all things and does not compete with them.’ Merlin turns the future king into a fish as part of his education in T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, and as a fish ‘he could do what men always wanted to do, that is fly. There is practically no difference between flying in water and flying in the air … It was like the dreams ...”

“... mostly took Hemingway at his macho word and accepted the Life magazine image of him as a bearded king. It took the shock of his suicide to show the thin ice on which his sovereignty stood, and the black depths below.) Despite the formal and practical advantages of waiting, financially it is better to strike while the body is still warm. Editors and agents ...”

“... starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is ...”

“... followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever written ... I am not, of course, claiming a place ...”

“... prostitution and incest (the play opens as Pericles discovers the incestuous relationship between King Antiochus and his daughter, and has to flee the murderer dispatched to silence him). The versions of Pericles that were performed or printed tended to cut out, or minimise, these elements. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales ...”

“... the atrocity in Charleston explicitly; no one had to. We were in the church where Martin Luther King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967. We were honouring the life of America’s leading free jazz musician in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the Emanuel African ...”

“... that year, however, with the arrival of Howard K. Beale.Beale was a disciple of the historian Charles Beard, who taught that political ideology was a mask for economic self-interest. Beale had recently published The Critical Year, in which he followed Beard in viewing the Civil War not as a struggle over slavery but as a second American Revolution, which ...”

“... do-nothings; also like Hunt (whose earliest recollection was of his father’s room in the King’s Bench prison in 1784), he seems to have spent his entire life in debt. A century and a half after the publication of Bleak House, the shadow of Skimpole is lifting. Whatever Hunt’s faults, he was manifestly neither an idler nor a scoundrel, and there ...”

“... In some instances, we might wish we knew the questions that sparked his answers. Writing to thank Charles Dodgson for a photographic portrait taken on a visit to Christ Church in January 1861, Faraday offered the following notes on Dodgson’s (lost) queries: The ammonia comes from the cheese evolved by a slow action analogous to decay. You may see the ...”

“... thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the one, or to the animation and variety that she ...”

“... it about right. It was pretty motley to be a sort of Jacobite (‘It was a’ for our rightfu’ king’), and also a sort of Jacobin (‘a perjured Blockhead and an unprincipled Prostitute’ was his comment on the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette). Again, mourning Scotland’s loss of independence and praising the British constitution are none ...”

“... his brother’s radicalism. Basil and his German wife, Katharina, have two children, Griselda and Charles. Around the Wellwoods circles a busy group of writers, radical academics, freethinkers, theatre directors and potters. Philip Warren joins this fortunate circle by chance: he is discovered in the basement of the South Kensington Museum, where he has been ...”

“... it would be fun to sign the visitors’ book, is unknowable. The big fish Brewer catches is Charles Babbage, who came in 1828. Despite being on what was supposed to be a rest cure, he and a friend had themselves lowered on ropes into the crater. Their guide, the resilient Madonna, declined to join them. But all Babbage appears to have written in the ...”

“... I look up at a gable-end: Lest We Forget This plaque is dedicated to the memory of Lt Col Trevor King died July 1994 Major W. (Frenchie) Marchant These men were killed near this spot by the enemies of Ulster. No Sacrifice is too great for one’s country. This looks like an unyielding Loyalist memorial, but the sense now is of working-class Protestants ...”

“... clear. Watergate fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of ...”