“... and has retrieved letters, chiefly early and chiefly to his brother, the Labour Minister, Sir Charles Trevelyan, which show the forces that inspired G.M. Trevelyan’s history. Her study makes her father accessible as a human being for the first time, relieves him from the imputation of being too much of a paragon to be interesting, and shows him, without ...”

“... these equations between freedom and certain forms of life, how can MacCallum and his followers hope to rescue their contention that all intelligible claims about liberty must be claims about absence of constraint? As far as I can see, their only recourse will be to suggest that the arguments I have cited from Green and Bosanquet are not intelligible as ...”

“... there. But this was not the case, and the Police had arrived there before him (for reasons that Charles Penwarden does not explain), so that there was no shooting on that day. But it was in an atmosphere of suspicion, accusation and family hysteria that the local gendarmerie began their investigation. The outline of the case is fairly simple, although the ...”

“... Victorian years. From the world of Landseer and Dickens to that of Henry James and Whistler, what Charles Darwin elsewhere called the ‘tone’ of mind had changed.Darwin turned 69 in February 1878. He felt that ‘large & difficult subjects’ were now beyond him and that ‘considering my age … it will be the more prudent course … to use my remaining ...”

“... The double-bottomed ship was from the start intended to be a public-private partnership: Charles II initially gave it vocal support but no money; Petty ventured some of his own funds; Viscount Massereene, a big Irish landowner, put in some more. The Royal Society, which was itself still hoping for Crown subvention, appointed an elite ...”

“... In the autumn​ of 1777, as the American War ground on, Charles James Fox paid his first visit to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth. The young duchess was captivated by her new house guest. His conversation, Georgiana told her mother, ‘is like a brilliant player at billiards, the strokes follow one another piff paff ...”

“... before that ‘war becomes like life itself. It’s all there is: not a passion any more nor a hope. Like life, rather sad and resigned, it wears a tired face, seamed and worn, similar to our own.’ All over Europe young men were finding out much the same thing, but this scholar and essayist, the friend and colleague of Benedetto Croce, put the matter ...”

“... as they do to the spirit of the age in which they appear. The Fountain, the novel which made Charles Morgan’s reputation, came out in 1932 and had a very considerable succès d’estime. It was much admired in France, where Morgan still has a solid reputation. Valéry admired it, writing that in Morgan’s novels ‘the song of life is always ...”

“... beheaded ‘for the horrid fanatic plot, contrived for the bringing in, as they then called him, Charles Stuart, and the restoring of monarchy.’ This remark functions mainly as an alibi for his loyalty to the post-Protectorate political structure, and is intended to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like ...”

“... in their doom, just like me. These days goldfish are my homies.Fishing is an occasion for hope. In my case, in the first instance, it was the hope of making a connection to my father, Bert Lahr, known to most people nowadays as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. An older dad, cut off both by his comedian’s ...”

“... poet like Hill is precisely that his medium, British English, is much more knowing than he can hope to be, or perhaps would want to be. However, recognising that British English is unavoidably depraved, let us be continually aware, and make our readers aware, of how duplicitous it is – that is at all events one way forward, and the way that Hill has ...”

“... they met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part of the town’, and found him making models and playing with his two ...”

“... and France lives happily ever after in the belly of the beast.) Three years later, in a note from Charles Rivkin, Stapleton’s successor, Sarkozy has become the tetchy figurehead who has his plane diverted so as not to see the Eiffel Tower lit up in the Turkish national colours on the occasion of a state visit by Recep Erdogan. By now, realism has set in at ...”

“... flash-bulbed and praised by Camus for producing ‘a kind of miracle’, became a repository of hope for those wishing Algerian-French relations could be soothed, was pronounced ‘the granddaughter of a witch’ and a girl who ‘has never learned anything’. A year later, Edmonde Charles-Roux profiled her in Vogue.At ...”

“... Charles Sorley must have been the most brilliant of all the young poets who died in the First World War. Yet ‘brilliant’, with its flashy, brittle connotations, isn’t the right word. He was undeniably clever, and forthright, but also good-humoured and modest, often very funny, shrewd and serious, but never (the young man’s vice) priggish ...”