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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... almost unchanged throughout his career.’ He was born in 1863. His mother was the daughter of Charles Lavy, a prosperous Hamburg merchant who had set his son-in-law up in business in London. She was ‘perhaps the deepest and sometimes the most difficult love of his life’. His father is now best known for his collection of erotica: his bibliographies ...”

“... of state William Seward drinks too much and blusters about invading Canada; the US ambassador Charles Francis Adams keeps a stiff and chilly distance from London society, managing to seem both unformed and overly formal; the Confederate envoy James Mason says ‘chaw’ for ‘chew’, calls himself ‘Jeems’ and offends British officials with his crude ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in his book Fan-Mail (1977), for example, owe an obvious debt to Auden’s epistle. So do Charles Osborne’s self-advertising ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’ (‘The fact is that I’m writing a huge book/About you – it’s a kind of ‘Life and Works’ – / In which I aim to take a searching look/At all your poems, books and plays, your ...”