“... education. Oxbridge in the 1840s was not without its Germanising tendencies, however, while Charles Bell, who was Owen’s predecessor as Hunterian Professor, was both an Edinburgh man and an ardent Paleyan (contributor, in fact, to the Bridgewater Treatises), as was that archetypal new man and adoptive Londoner, hardly a reassuring figure to the landed ...”

“... tribe. Imelda Marcos visited and declared herself a changed person; so did Gina Lollobrigida and Charles Lindbergh. National Geographic came and went twice. Everyone who visited the Tasaday was ravished by the remote setting and touched by the group’s affectionate spontaneity. For their part the Tasaday became deeply attached to John Nance and positively ...”

“... I read or reread two hundred or so by other writers to provide context. In 1957, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft described reading detective stories as ‘in a way the opposite of having psychoanalytic treatment. The motive underlying one is to deny insight and underlying the other is to gain it.’ This might be true of the characters inside the books, but ...”

“... of Austria. That is, he was named after, or had usurped and was allowed the name of, the son of Charles V and victor of the battle of Lepanto – the short-lived, but symbolically important, sea victory of Spain over Islam two generations earlier. He was a fool called Don Juan of Austria. ‘The Jester Named Don Juan of Austria’ (1633) What did it ...”

“... in the 1840s to populate the huge rockery, fissured with crevices and ravines, which Sir Charles Isham created in front of his bedroom window. The rockery reflected Isham’s love of the Alpine but he was also widely read in folklore, a believer in spiritualism and convinced of the existence of ‘mine fairies’. Vegetarian, against blood ...”

“... Essex. 7. 1828, month unknown. Shot at Holme-on-Spalding-Moor, Yorkshire, by the keeper of Lord Charles Stourton. 8. 1840, month unknown. Caught in a state of exhaustion near Marshchapel in North Lincolnshire. 9. 1841, 21 December. Shot at Margate, Kent, by a boy ‘employed in keeping crows’; sold to a dealer for fourpence, then exhibited in Margate ...”

“... Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior? I met the man who ordered this operation, the defence minister Charles Hernu, not long before it took place. I still have the autographed copy of his book that he gave me, Nous … les grands, which has a picture of a French nuclear submarine on the cover. He seemed to me a man of gravitas and good sense, but shortly after ...”

“... Pearson to bring statistical thinking to biology; the popularisation of the Mendelian message by Charles Davenport and other eugenicists (to baleful effect). Radick weaves these familiar elements into his account to show the ways in which biology was becoming more professional, and international, at the end of the 19th century.Young researchers could now ...”

“... oblivious to the Gothic values, run wire fences across the cherished sward and set up a silver-fox farm. The novel doesn’t quite say so, but Tony’s failure is really a function of his Anglicanism, which Waugh thought an enfeebling disposition to believe nothing very much. ‘Do you believe in God?’ Mr Todd asks Tony, to which he flimsily ...”

“... Otley Chevin, too – or Rain, Steam and Speed. ‘Colchester, Essex’ (c.1825) Until the fox became the object of the chase in the mid-19th century, hares were as central to hunting as deer. ‘Of all the chases, the hare makes the greatest pastime and pleasure,’ wrote the anonymous 18th-century author of The Huntsman. According to Gaston ...”

“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”

“... borders and blend into one another with as much vigour and energy as languages themselves. Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé of 1697 had included versions of what became known as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Bluebeard and Puss in Boots. As early as the 1630s, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone had presented (in a wildly ...”

“... to me in the stalls. How could Pinocchio be so stupid as to be led astray by the patently wicked Fox, or Snow White not know the Queen was up to no good? Had the Queen been flesh and blood and not a cartoon she might well have been played by Joan Crawford, who was always something of an enigma to me. I never liked her, and with her gaunt face, protruding ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”