“... himself as a writer in Paris. He had a talent for attracting loyal friends. His first employer, Charles Ephrussi, secured him at the Prussian Court at a salary equal to that of a French MP. Later, when he was destitute, Gustave Kahn published his new work in La Vogue, the magazine that made his name. Laforgue also attracted women. These ties were ephemeral ...”

“... THE TIGER’S VICTIM; or, The Death of Major Munro’. The part of the major was played by Mr Wood; the tiger, by ‘the famous Dog Bruin’. And as late as 1845 the advertisement for a sideshow in Bristol ran: ‘To be seen within, the same tiger that killed Major Munro on Saugor Island, with the major in his mouth, in the agonies of death, and his two ...”

“... it wasn’t a lapse: he pursued it as a programme. When, as a student, his teacher Charles Gleyre inquired whether ‘it’s to amuse yourself that you are dabbling in paint?’, Renoir was forthright in his response: ‘If it didn’t amuse me, I beg you to believe I wouldn’t do it.’ Coming from a poor family, there had been no straight ...”

“... of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later recalled the Harlem Renaissance as ‘that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American ...”

“... to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother country’? Stewart had employed slave-hunters to capture Somerset and put him on a boat for ...”

“... were taken between 6.30 and 9 p.m., so major matters often weren’t debated until after midnight. Charles Forbes, MP for Malmesbury, complained in 1825 that ‘bills which concerned India were constantly introduced at a late period of the session and were regularly passed at a late hour of the night’. The Commons sometimes didn’t adjourn until four ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hold the ratio at two to one, and make sure that native detachments developed no common identity. Charles Wood, secretary of state for India under Palmerston, made no bones about the objective: ‘I wish to have a different and rival spirit in different regiments, so that Sikh might fire into Hindoo, Goorkha into either, without any scruple in case of ...”

“... up on a stump farm just north of Seattle. He delivered milk for his father. He learned how to chop wood, how to use a two-handled saw. Tools were important to him, the right kit for the right job. In Kitkitdizze, there are tools everywhere, racks and stacks of them, useful objects respected like artworks. Blades, chisels, axes, boots, helmets, guns. The actor ...”

“... in music a long time before anywhere else. Lacking strong leadership at court after the death of Charles II, the musical profession had to rely on and adapt itself to private patronage without any guide as to how it was to be done. In Italy, in France, in much of Germany, both composer and performer were sheltered among an understanding community. They were ...”

“... warn’. The Hunterian Museum in London used to exhibit the skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, whose fate inspired Hilary Mantel to write a fine novel, The Giant, O’Brien, which examines the surgeon John Hunter’s avid pursuit of specimen bodies to study, the more unusual the more covetable. At the Hunterian, which is currently closed for ...”

“... used for Customs and Immigration, stand 29 pillars of sandstone, steel, I-beam and hacked, charred wood. One is inscribed with the few known names of local Aborigines – the Eora people; others with Latin and Eora names for local botanical species. Several are inset with organic materials – ash, bone, shell, resin and human hair – that evoke the Eora’s ...”

“... Full of kind spousal forbearance when I tell her we desperately need expensive vintage-salvaged-wood kitchen ‘eco-hutch’ – I’ve just seen it on the Sundance Catalog website – with special digitally temperature-controlled rack for wine bottles. But she’s also taken to reading me bits of The Wisdom of Schopenhauer over the cell phone: That human ...”

“... 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 ...”