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“... their bills; flower varieties, painted on sticks, people the hollows: Manon Lescaut is here, and Jules Verne, Rip Van Winkle bedded down with Salome and Rosy Splendour; Burning Heart, Martinette, Gigantic Star. And check the mail! I’m expecting a letter. Behind the house, stone sphinxes and a line of statues, trussed up, black-bagged for the ...”

“... with the camera, his interests constantly flitted elsewhere. He was, in the words of his friend Jules Verne, ‘enamoured of the impossible’. His career in portrait photography lasted a relatively short time, most of it packed into the 1850s and 1860s. Alongside it, he achieved a series of historical firsts, with and without the camera: the first ...”

“... cradles of high-rise téléfériques without pausing to sleep back-to-back every few seconds. Jules Verne’s Backwards to Britain has also been a long time on the way. Written in 1859, it was first published in France in 1989. In the introduction by William Butcher it is described both as a time-bomb and a time-capsule, but it is neither of those ...”

“... Oliver Sacks is the Jules Verne of the neurological interface. Knowledgeable about science, he also wishes to summon a host of readers to a great adventure, a journey to the centre of the body and ways of knowing about bodies. As with Verne’s skilful use of half-understood scientific symbols, the project that Sacks has come to make his own has brought into public view a gallery of exotic events and phenomena that, precisely in their strangeness, remain memorable to the untrained reader ...”

“... Journey of Niels Klim (1741) with its fantasy of a separate planet hidden inside the Earth to Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth with its dinosaur bones and underground ocean, disclose a hidden vastness of both space and time. Williams has an entertaining account of the US Congressional expedition of 1838-42 to the coast of Antarctica; one of ...”

“... 19th and 20th-century history of science, political history, fiction (the ‘lost worlds’ of Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Bur roughs and Arthur Conan Doyle), film, advertising, depth psychology and art (paintings in art museums and museums of science, cartoons and comics). The scholarship is successfully air-brushed by an elegant Post-Modern ...”

“... that yoked together Timothy Leary, anti-Freud polemic and Andrea Dworkin. ‘Oliver Sacks is the Jules Verne of the neurological interface’ was the opening of another piece. Just as often, the most startling insights appeared as throwaways. ‘It’s a moot point as to whether one should recommend books about madness’ is an aside in a review of Roy ...”

“... the English (or Welsh?) ‘Kinnock’. Gaspard Winckler, the puzzle-maker, was once a devotee of Jules Verne. The epigraph to Perec’s novel – ‘Look with all your eyes, look’ – is also taken from Verne. The act of looking, in its turn, leads to speculation, puzzling and surmise; it teases the brain. For ...”

“... the penumbra of scientific mystery still glowed intensely. In the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne the balloon became a vehicle for adventures that blurred the line between documentary and fantasy, transporting readers to the interior of Africa or the upper atmosphere: the here-be-dragons hinterlands that hovered just beyond the scientific ...”

“... bossy and oracular, he can be engaging. Not all his comic moments are unintentional. ‘The New Jules Verne’ is an elaborate frolic that certainly outstays its welcome, but it does at least offer flashes of genuine humour. ‘Lithuanian Nocturne’ sustains an imaginative conceit – the poet as nocturnal revenant addressing a distant colleague ...”

“... orator Dion of Prusa, and Lucian, who imagined going to the moon centuries before Jules Verne thought of it. ‘I began the writing of my Lives for the sake of others,’ Plutarch wrote, ‘but I find that I am continuing the work and delighting in it now for my own sake also, using history as a mirror and endeavouring in a manner to ...”

“... reputation was an asset to the French Navy because the tales of his adventures, like those of Jules Verne, encouraged recruits. It would be surprising, however, if this were the only reason for the remarkably indulgent view the authorities took of his activities, real or alleged. Apart from his account in Le Figaro of the battle of Hué in ...”

“... earnest in the mid-19th century. ‘The great depths of the ocean are entirely unknown to us,’ Jules Verne declared in 1869, in the early pages of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. ‘What passes in those remote depths – what beings live, or can live, twelve or fifteen miles beneath the surface of the waters – what is the organisation of ...”

“... doubt.’ Ackroyd credits Poe’s elaborately plotted ‘balloon hoax’ with leading the way for Jules Verne and H.G. Wells – not to mention the great 20th-century hoaxer, Orson Welles. He wasn’t to be trusted. But what was never in question was his talent – or genius, as he rightly preferred to call it. Born into a down-and-out theatre family and ...”

“... Club Alpin in 1882 (a scale model was featured at the Exposition Universelle of 1889). Inspired by Jules Verne, Martel went on to recount his exploration of more than two hundred underground caverns and rivers, including the Gouffre de Padirac and, most spectacularly, the Gorges du Verdon, which had of course been known to local inhabitants for centuries ...”