“... about Von Stauffenberg’s disgusting treachery be given the airing that history requires? As for Charles Colson, surely beyond any disagreement one of the more poisonous of the little vipers clamouring at liberty’s battered bosom during those grisly two years of the second administration, not even Longford can actually deny that he had been a bit ...”

“... very American way, with the possibility of sin?In screwball proper, desire is masked as conflict. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night introduced an early version of the clashing couple, with Clark Gable’s reporter falling for Claudette Colbert’s runaway heiress. He’s a rogue who’s not all that roguish, and she’s mad but not all that mad. He admits ...”

“... The Barracks (1963), The Dark (1965) – and in some of his best short stories. ‘Gugering,’ Frank Shovlin explains in a footnote, ‘is the act of dropping seed potatoes into holes in the ground.’ Uncle Pat, he suggests, is a model for the fictional character ‘The Shah’ in McGahern’s final novel, That They Might Face the Rising Sun ...”

“... New York – contrary to popular opinion and Frank Sinatra – is never a city that doesn’t sleep. It sleeps soundly in fact. You walk the streets on certain nights and suddenly you can feel quite alone under the buildings. It’s not that the place is deserted, there are things going on – taxi-cabs, homeless people, late-night walkers, the police – but they can seem to proceed at that hour like things out of step, like odd yearnings of the imagination, or unexpected items in a gasoline-smelling dream of urban ruin ...”

“... rebels. Fid. Def. survives on the coinage, though threatened with pluralisation of faiths under Charles III. But Ind. Imp. vanished seventy years ago, a fading embarrassment even then, to be explained away as a typical piece of Disraeli’s showmanship. Historians have shied away from closer examination of Queen Victoria’s role as empress, but the subject ...”

“... would make this complaint about Delius’s music.Dibble’s previous books include biographies of Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, and in this one he approaches Delius principally as a British composer. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the sections on Britain are the strongest. Dibble shuttles between context, reception and analysis to illuminate his ...”

“... demanded. By 1907, James was with the Whartons in Paris for a two-month stay, and she wrote to Charles Eliot Norton in praise of her visitor’s character (not his works): ‘The more one knows him the more one wonders – admires the mixture of wisdom – tolerance, of sensitiveness – sympathy, that makes his heart even more interesting to contemplate ...”

“... the Hollywood Hills under eyelids heavy with disillusion there’s been a booster, starting with Charles Fletcher Lummis, who in 1884 took 143 days to walk from Ohio to Los Angeles and was hired on arrival by the patron of the Los Angeles Times, Colonel (later General) Harrison Gray Otis. Lummis helped to forge the booster image described by Kevin Starr in ...”

“... hearing, a field of vision that picks up anything that shouldn’t be there, the smell of Charles, and even on some of the blackest nights on earth, I had the ability to see Charles in fields of purple – literally sense his location, see his energy and assume control of it and be the first to kill.’ This is to ...”

“... The commune that never took shape is now embalmed in a few poems and the Platonic heat of a frank correspondence; but the friends worked steadily in Bristol in 1795, from an energy of reverence in anticipation of the exemplary life they would share. ‘Our names are written in the book of destiny on the same page,’ said Southey. Less profane, but as ...”

“... the author of the political play The Spanish Gipsy that was performed at Whitehall after Prince Charles’s return from Madrid in 1623, ‘the prince only being there’. Not all political literature was aimed at the Court or at the nobility that encircled it, as Alastair Bellany’s The Politics of Court Scandal, which examines the spread and impact of ...”

“... as they bear on the action; and their character is indeed altered dramatically by the arrival of Charles Grandet, of the Paris branch of the family, who thinks them incurably provincial. In many 19th-century novels, description furthers narrative. However, it can still bring narrative to an abrupt halt; and the things which obtrude when it does are not such ...”

“... they possibly have in common, these wildly different figures, the nature boy and the urban genie?Charles Arthur Russell Jr was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in May 1951, and died in New York in April 1992 from complications related to Aids. His father, Chuck, a former naval officer, was the town mayor. It’s easy to picture something down-home and folksy, but the ...”

“... whose chimney loomed over the street. The landlord, a former heavyweight boxing champion called Charles Brown, also Jamaican, had given Brown permission to use the kitchen of the ground-floor flat recently vacated by Reginald and Ethel Christie, who had been tenants since 1938.What happened when Beresford Brown started banging his nail into the wall is ...”

“... distract him from his writing apart from endless rounds of socialising and travel. His father was Charles ‘Good-time Charlie’ Merrill, cofounder of Merrill Lynch, who earned his moniker through prodigious accumulation of money and women. James Merrill was at the forefront of American poetry in the 1970s but is seldom read today. Despite this, he is a ...”