“... watching the political disarray in the US and the failure of various US security plans, there is hope that the US and its local allies are on the verge of defeat: a sentiment encouraged by the enduring belief on the Islamist wing of the insurgency that with God on their side victory is certain. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government, and the parties and militias on ...”

“... become France. The publisher’s blurb for House of Lilies claims that the Capetians – Charles IV, who died in 1328, was the last king in the direct line – ‘did not simply rule France: they created it.’To what extent does Justine Firnhaber-Baker’s book justify the claim that the dynasty can be credited with the formation of national ...”

“... on a transcendent scale: just how transcendent you can see by looking at one of the tables in Charles Williams’s book, which shows Bradman, with his lifetime Test average of 99.94, almost forty runs an innings ahead of any other player, the run-rich Lara included. Not that a single hit for four would have done for me that day; I wanted to sit through a ...”

“... has been delayed until 2016.) The first line of the first draft for the book that was to become Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of Advanced Capitalism is about allegory: ‘Tout pour moi devient allégorie,’ ‘for me everything becomes allegory.’ This epigraph is from Baudelaire’s poem ‘The Swan’. In it the poet thinks of ...”

“... still doesn’t have electricity or running water. It hasn’t had any since February 1990, when Charles Taylor – former warlord, later president, currently in exile in Nigeria, where he’s still causing trouble, according to the Coalition for International Justice, funding armed groups and political parties across West Africa – sent his militia to take ...”

“... the history of France in the last century is embodied in the strange trinity of Philippe Pétain, Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand. Pétain, born in 1856, was old enough to remember the humiliation of France at the hands of Prussia in 1870, and like other French officers of his period, spent his entire military career in anticipation of what he ...”

“... secured by the Glorious Revolution, but several years before it, as an urgent and daring attack on Charles II’s bid for absolutism. It was less an abstract statement of principle than an exercise in persuasion. What was true of Locke’s work, historians soon learned to remind themselves, was equally so of all the great books in that broad movement of ...”

“... on me.’ What on earth were they looking for – Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley – that they should have rated Bosley’s heart-warming dexterity (feelingful as well as formal) below, for instance, 18 solid unpunctuated pages of pornographic daydream: Kenneth Bernard’s ‘The Baboon in the Night Club’? Did they judge the ...”

“... the knowledge that Sir Archy MacSarcasm and Sir Pertinax MacSycophant come from a play by Charles Macklin, together with Sir Callagham O’Brallaghan. As it happens, this information is still to be found in the fifth edition, and I suppose it might be vital to somebody some day. Drabble, as this tiny example shows, has used Harvey as a data base, but ...”

“... of leisure and national prestige, has so much dirt been scrubbed so expensively and with so much hope invested in the particles. You could almost eat the soil now. The first time I saw London was in 1981, just after the wedding of Charles and Diana. I came to Stratford for two weeks to stay with my uncle. It smelled funny ...”

“... Were all his commercial sponsors equally happy with their investment? Did some of them, perhaps, hope to see the names of their products perpetuated in the Polar landscape – Mount Weetabix, Cape Oxo and so forth? As it is, the natural features in those parts tend to be named after the more lowering emotions like Dread, Disappointment and Despair. Fiennes ...”

“... of the earth – revenge, he said, for Hera’s mistreatment of their queen. In 1694 the scientist Charles Morton suggested in deadly earnest that the stork, along with the swallow and crane, wintered on the moon. Then, in 1822, a stork arrived in a German village with a thirty-inch spear in its neck. The spear, metal-tipped, rising up through the bird’s ...”

“... of making paintings. He took an equally clear view of human destiny. He did not find much to hope for. He asked Chopin if he shared a feeling of ‘unbearable emptiness’, and said that progress must carry with it not still greater progress, but a final negation of progress – a return to the point from which we set out. Delacroix’s early successes ...”

“... the scenario of God’s justice in poems such as ‘Charity’, offering moderation, virtue, hope and piety as earnests of salvation. His poetry spun a co-cooning Edenic vision of pastoral sanctuary and retirement, a still-life where Nature was civil, and peace, measure and protection reigned amidst the cosy comforts of friends. The fête champêtre of ...”

“... They are not what they should be.’ After that, the number of streetlamps is increased and Sir Charles Warren, the Police Commissioner, forced to resign. The extra streetlamps do nothing for the insides of the buildings, where people are even more on top of each other than they are outside in the streets. This is not what Victorian family life is supposed ...”