“... a biographer, already manifest in his detailed and persuasive studies of Tennyson, FitzGerald and Charles Kingsley, are at their best in that rich Victorian ambience where religion, art and sex mingled in an unself-conscious totality. He several times takes for granted in criticism or exposition that Hopkins is one of the ‘great’ Victorian poets, but ...”

“... Variation 1: Schoenberg and the Serial Quartet’) we are brought to the near-present of the slap-wood school of composition; of Elliott Carter’s Third Quartet, which summons electronic aids not for the instruments but for the actual ears of the players; and of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth, which could fairly be nicknamed ‘the apotheosis of the ...”

“... neglect. Syrians who for years avoided the dilapidated bazaars are revisiting the charm of mud and wood, stone and marble, running fountains and cobbled paths too narrow for cars. A few landlords are turning their empty palaces into hotels, restaurants and bars where the young stay late into the night in jasmine-scented courtyards to savour water pipes as ...”

“... upon the fire, and a very small quantity of the medicine put in, and stirred with a stick of wood, it came forth in great proportion perfect gold, to the touch, to the hammer, to the test.’ Alchemy was the passion of the age, and nowhere more so than at the Court of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague. When Dee left for England in 1589, Kelley remained. His ...”

“... all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating the story. Here Naipaul has become Biswas, as we ...”

“... this, forgetting to mention that Rome was in fact taken by mercenaries of the Catholic Emperor Charles V. More was astonishingly disingenuous. Throughout the late 1520s, he claimed that anti-clericalism was identical with heresy, when he, an early anti-clerical, knew this to be untrue. In reply to one Simon Fish, who had argued that England’s travails ...”

“... are his selected diaries, Joseph Cornell’s Theatre of the Mind, edited by Mary Ann Caws, and Charles Simic’s prose poems, an inspired labour of love called Dime Store Alchemy.Cornell’s life as an artist began the day he showed his Ernst-inspired collages to Julien Levy, whose gallery brought Surrealism to America. Levy asked Cornell to design the ...”

“... with fractious children journeyed to see a lump of coal, a steam engine and three hundred kinds of wood. As a schoolboy in 1925 I was taken, willingly enough, to Wembley to the British Empire Exhibition, then in its second triumphal year. I have only the fuzziest recollections of Imperial pavilions and palaces of engineering. Dimly, I recall seeing Canada’s ...”

“... too unreliable, Pyke adopted the notion, developed by American scientists, of reinforcing it with wood-pulp: the startlingly tough, rigid material that resulted was christened Pykrete (it’s a minor oddity, given Foden’s pedantry about Habbakuk/ Habakkuk, that he spells this Pykerete). Before the project was called off in late 1943, a good deal of work had ...”

“... any sort of ponderous Van der Post with his laboured shamanistic aesthetic and the vacuous Charles Windsor nodding sagely at his elbow. Bellum didn’t know about the Mantis mating with the Eland and giving birth to the Moon. Bellum’s circumstances didn’t leave a hell of a lot of room for mysticism. But in his coarse, stultifying, urban world he ...”

“... There aren’t many novels with exclamation marks in their titles. Used without irony – as in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! – they strive too hard, leaving us no room for manoeuvre. Absalom, Absalom! by Faulkner and Look at the Harlequins! by Nabokov, on the other hand, are more subtle, creating some distance between us and their tellers, if not their tales ...”

“... as the Allegory of Painting (c.1638-39), completed while Artemisia was in London at the court of Charles I, comes nearest to suggesting that its maker embodies what for everyone else remains an abstraction. The young female painter at work in the composition is a close match for Cesare Ripa’s iconography of ‘Painting’: she has the requisite black hair ...”

“... agenda for debate on the English Revolution since the Seventies. Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline ...”

“... until 1650, but was privately circulated in 1640, when Parliament was finally convened by Charles I for the first time in 11 years, and members of the Short Parliament were vociferously denouncing the king’s attacks on liberty. Later that year, Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him in danger. He would remain in ...”

“... In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent virtues of failure), Charles Nicholl unearths more detail and offers more seductive speculation than any previous writer. With the vigorous Return of the Subject that besets many contemporary historians, he also can’t resist elbowing to the forefront with a Channel 4 expedition to ...”