“... a mystical appreciation of Tibetan culture, inspiring him to found the World Congress of Faiths. Charles Howard-Bury, the leader of the 1921 expedition, lived a life normally found only in boys’ adventure stories, that of a war hero, explorer and spy fluent in 27 languages. Charles Bell became a friend of the Dalai Lama ...”

“... from them. London’s wealthy had been moving west since the 17th century and McWilliam fixes on Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 as the moment when the economy took off again after the uncertainties and destruction caused by the Civil Wars. The plague saw only a temporary retreat, and the population of London quadrupled between 1550 and 1700. It was ...”

“... the surface of Tony Blair’s Christian Socialism, a line which descends via F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Blair contrives to put an upbeat spin on his ‘muscular Christianity’ (‘tough’ is his favoured term) but the essence of Carlylism is gloom, its energy, as Heffer stresses, the perverse recklessness of despair. ‘Pessimist ...”

“... read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about corpses being committed to their snows by English clergymen – Switzerland was not yet an English colony, though beginning to look like one – and the bodies were reinterred at ...”

“... When​ the 22-year-old Charles Darwin joined HMS Beagle in 1831 he took a copy of Paradise Lost with him, and over the next five years he read it many times, in Brazil, Patagonia, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia and Mauritius. As the ship’s naturalist he sent commentaries and specimens back to colleagues in London, who soon came to see him not as a dilettante but an extremely acute observer ...”

“... intense interaction, inspired by the fumey influences of Shelley, Byron and Blake. The charismatic Charles Hoop, orator and visionary, compels men, women and children into his orbit, not always to their benefit. Dame Betty: Her School tells how the widow of an Army captain, left destitute, taught the neighbours’ children in her tiny cottage in ...”

“... wonderment that we know so well from children’s fiction, or from adult versions like Swift and Dickens. This is not to be despised, for this wonderment returns fiction to its first principles, its primal scene. But it is startling to find it so openly done in a contemporary American novel. The wonderment begins where it must, at the beginning of the real ...”

“... and Cranbrook could just as easily be damned by conservative aesthetes in the mould of Prince Charles as having yoked the English working man to alien, totalitarian forms of dwelling.Lubetkin, who died in 1990, gave his critics plenty to work with. He did have an ego; he deployed his enormous intellect with more force than tact. He and his ...”

“... disapproved of Lamb, Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and Charles Buller were old friends, and Irving too, though Irving – now a popular preacher absorbed in miracle cures and speaking in tongues (‘hoo-ing and ha-ing’) – was making Carlyle increasingly uneasy. Mill he had met three years earlier, and the two had ...”

“... thrown her historical progression out of alignment.) Paintings of Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII, dramatically usher in a new era. The demurely erotic portraits of Agnès, Yalom states, mark ‘a transition from the ideal of the sacred breast associated with motherhood to that of the eroticised breast denoting sexual pleasure’. No longer the ...”

“... Trollope is our most popular and reprinted Victorian novelist. His new companions in the Abbey – Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy – may sell more copies of individual novels, but they cannot match the expansiveness of Trollope’s appeal. Forty or more of his works are currently in print – some in as many as five different editions ...”

“... in a single period of life through an assembly of indicative moments. Instead, like a biography of Dickens or Byron, this book is nearly cradle to grave: it describes sixty years of a life from the perspective of a man who wants to know what accidents led him to be where and who he is. It’s a reminiscence, sometimes fond, sometimes self-flagellating ...”

“... and unannotated 30-volume Centenary Edition (1896-99), is also American, administered by the Dickens Project, a ‘multicampus research group of the University of California’. It has been made possible by the richness of the Carlyle materials, including Carlyle’s corrected proofs for the 1841 edition of Sartor, collected by Norman and Charlotte ...”

“... done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery Sam, ‘Old Peepy’, a mixture of Charles Pooler and Paul Pry, a natural target for clerihews (‘Sam Pepys, Gives one the crepys’) and the wags of 1066 and All That. If the diary had been seized and burned by the hangman his reputation need never have suffered, though he might well have been ...”

“... be that Britain’s way of opening up the country – with gunboats – was counter-productive. Charles Elliot, a far gentler envoy than Pottinger, which is why Palmerston eventually sacked him, thought it would have been (in Lovell’s paraphrase) ‘better for the long term to bank goodwill than hard cash’. In the very long term this has turned out to ...”