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“... strode into the Senate chamber shortly after the daily session had ended. Two days earlier, Charles Sumner, the Senate’s most outspoken critic of slavery, had delivered a five-hour speech, ‘The Crime against Kansas’. Sumner not only denounced the ‘rape’ of Kansas by pro-slavery forces, which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town ...”

“... time to propagate the myth of China’s epochal stagnation. During the Great Exhibition of 1851, Charles Dickens and Richard Horne wrote a piece for Household Words that contrasted the wonders of the Crystal Palace with the quaintness of an accompanying display of artefacts from China at a gallery in Hyde Park Place. ‘It is very curious,’ ...”

“... a character in them with whom you would willingly associate yourself? This is not the humour of Dickens, whom Leacock so greatly admired: it is the humour of the classical mind, when the classical mind takes a humorous course. It is an observing, cool, apparently easygoing mind that misses nothing and is deluded by nothing. It is very much an adult ...”

“... may often be a substitute for, not a summons to, revolution. Rochester’s obscene ‘Satyr on Charles II’ was the work not of a puritan revolutionary but of a privileged fellow libertine, and Private Eye’s fascination with the alleged exploits of ‘Randy Andy’ hardly suggested that the British royal family was in danger from republican ...”

“... effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the ...”

“... tissue paper of the elaborate metallic brocades with which their heraldic costumes were decorated. Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke ...”

“... Iwas asked​ the other day to name my dream man and dream woman, and answered with Charles II and Mrs Oliphant – Charles II being the hottest of British monarchs (admittedly not a strong field) and Mrs Oliphant the most criminally underrated of 19th-century novelists (see The Ladies Lindores ...”

“... much use to a novelist. Two broadly similar characters in the same novel won’t work. So Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville becomes Olivier-Jean-Baptiste de Clarel de Garmont, incorporating, as it were, the back half of Beaumont, who otherwise appears in the novel as Thomas de Blacqueville, Olivier’s best friend, bumped off in a duel before ...”

“... heroism intact. Or as the authors of the Titanic cookbook put it, contrasting a criticism by Charles Dickens of the poor first-class fare aboard Cunard’s Britannia in 1842, ‘no such complaints are recorded from any of the Titanic’s ...”

“... made her mark with a cross, being unable to write her name. She also said that she had once seen Charles Dickens. Her husband, Edward, who died in 1906, had been in the navy and fought in the Crimean War and then in the unpopular, cynical Second Opium War. Her son John, now head of the household and also in the navy, was in the Boer War, arguably the ...”

“... such mayhem. Five Points was built over the soupy landfill that had once been a polluted lake, and Charles Dickens observed during the 1840s that ‘all that is loathsome, drooping and decayed is here.’ The mysterious name merely denoted the intersection of Baxter, Worth and Park Streets, now buried beneath the city courts. The Points have had many ...”

“... of Pericles that were performed or printed tended to cut out, or minimise, these elements. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) has an Antiochus who commits ‘a shocking deed … in secret’ that is never specified, and a Marina who is sold into slavery, not prostitution. George Lillo’s theatrical ...”

“... was the original title of Little Dorrit, and he seeks to transport us back to the savage anger of Charles Dickens at the Circumlocution Office and the irresponsibility of uncontrolled change wrought by 19th-century capitalism – now being mirrored, as Burgess sees it, by the slide into late 20th-century socialist syndicalism. In short, the implication ...”

“... Wilson has not achieved a perfect novel. But neither has the greatest of the English novelists, Charles Dickens. Hemlock and After was written, it seems, in four weeks, just as ‘Raspberry Jam’ had been written in tremulous excitement in a single day. Throughout his work a rich and rapid creativity – ‘the pure horsepower of the narrator’, as ...”

“... drama of reality had its limits. Lady Jane and the rest of England, ably assisted by an enraged Charles Dickens, were having none of the suggestion that the party might have been nibbling on itself in the throes of starvation. It implied that in extremis Englishmen might lose the very treasure they took with them to plant in the wilderness: their moral ...”