“... last – merde au naturel. Simply hideous.’ He preferred, ‘in this beastly Paris’, to read Daniel Deronda. Even though it was a disappointment (‘the analysing and the sapience – to say nothing of the tortuosity of the style’), it made him realise ‘the English richness of George Eliot’ and ‘the superiority of English culture and the English ...”

“... the Mutiny had consorted perfectly readily with Europeans keeping Indian mistresses, like Sir Charles Metcalfe, or Indian wives, like General Wheeler of Cawnpore fame, had now to bow before the dictates of sexual apartheid. It was a sign of the power stucture under threat and in the first stages of decline. Even so, there were remarkable ...”

“... addiction to the ‘horror which accompanies the act of profaning’? The explanation offered by Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism was that modern culture had not defiled religion itself but the role of religion: art, he argued, had replaced religion as the gatekeeper of culture, but prostituted itself by embracing rather than taming ...”

“... past. Time was a source of conflict for the early inhabitants of the English colonies. James I, Charles I and Archbishop Laud held that the Sabbath should serve as a day for diversion as well as for worship. The Book of Sports, a set of regulations for Sundays and Holy Days issued by James in 1618, decreed thatafter the end of divine service our good people ...”

“... There are the otherwise politically defunct from both Right and Left, such as Michel Rocard and Charles Pasqua, Mario Soares, formerly Prime Minister of Portugal, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most celebrated soixantehuitard of all. Troops of British Tories displaced at the 1997 general election have found it a convenient ...”

“... is not – or not only – a form of self-indulgence. It is also a form of pathological empathy. Charles Darwin wanted to be a doctor, but was too sensitive to human suffering. It is a worrying thought – worrying enough to raise the pulse rate – that nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the job. For ...”

“... government offensive in Syria’s Idlib province had glowing reviews from commentators such as Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, who wrote that the weapons had ‘transformed the strategic dynamic 180 degrees’ in Idlib in just five days. The enthusiasm is easy to fathom. Drones create their own marketing commercials in the ...”

“... released – a brilliantly elegant idea first attested around 1430 in a chamber clock belonging to Charles of Burgundy. By 1488 Ludovico Sforza could commission a pendant watch so small that it could be worn around the neck, sounding the hours with a tiny bell. In the 15th century, they were already living in the future.Contemporaries were dazzled by the ...”

“... century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four hundred Jews ...”

“... the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was ...”

“... debate about the nature of the Other. As early as 1547, he wrote a short summary for the Emperor Charles V recounting the horrors of what was going on in the Americas: If Christians have killed and destroyed so very many souls of such great quality, it has been simply in order to have gold, to become exceedingly rich in a very short time and to raise ...”

“... the course the US is pursuing. In this country sensible discussion of terrorism is still possible. Charles Townshend, Paul Wilkinson and James Adams are immune to the hysteria that has afflicted Reagan’s America. Performing a miracle of compression, Mr Townshend tells the story of British ‘counter-insurgency’ in Ireland, the Middle ...”

“... of art; but at the time there was lively curiosity and interchange between Paris and London. Charles Deschamps, who sold Henry Hill his pictures, was a patron and friend of Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and later of Whistler. Monet came to London to avoid the Franco-Prussian War, Pissarro to avoid political persecution; both ...”

“... book inhabiting a historical Native point of view still seems to elude contemporary academics. Daniel Richter’s Facing East from Indian Country (2001), which contained vignettes narrated from the imagined vantage point of Natives, looms as a cautionary tale of over-identification.)The balance of forces in the early decades of the new nation was far from ...”

“... 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 ...”