Sublime

He was but seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common – at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him, shall draw their chariot.

The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes.

The sums involved in Dudley’s gambling are, however, chicken feed in comparison to those of Henry VIII fifty years earlier. January 1530 saw an entry in the privy purse records of £450 lost playing dominoes, and another £100 went on card games with the gentlemen of the privy chamber.

‘It began with L; it was almost all I’s, I fancy,’ he went on, with a sense that he was getting hold of the slippery name. But the hold was too slight, and he soon got tired of this mental chase; for few men were more impatient of private occupation or more in need of making themselves continually heard than Mr Raffles. He preferred using his time

cholera: in her notebook, ‘Quarry for Middlemarch’, George Eliot noted the appearance of cholera in England in 1831–2.

he had those ten pounds in his mind as a fund from which he might risk something, if there were a chance of a good bet. Why? Well, when sovereigns were flying about, why shouldn’t he catch a few? He would never go far along that road again; but a man likes to assure himself, and men of pleasure generally, what he could do in the way of mischief if

Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, was stranded from September 1704 to 2 February 1709 on one of the Juan Fernández islands off the coast of Chile.