“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Richard Horne wrote an epic poem, Orion, the year before Turner exhibited Rain, Steam and Speed. Charles Lamb’s version of the Odyssey appeared in 1808: ‘Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty hunter, who was hunting there the ghosts of the beasts which he had slaughtered in desert hills upon the earth.’ ‘Blind Orion ...”

“... show, thinks the first statement of the ‘as if they were apples’ cliché may have been Charles Morice’s in 1905. Morice was the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, so ‘loss of world’ was something he knew well. ‘Cézanne has no more interest in a face than in an apple, and both have no value in his eyes other than their ...”

“... In some instances, we might wish we knew the questions that sparked his answers. Writing to thank Charles Dodgson for a photographic portrait taken on a visit to Christ Church in January 1861, Faraday offered the following notes on Dodgson’s (lost) queries: The ammonia comes from the cheese evolved by a slow action analogous to decay. You may see the ...”

“... of Pericles that were performed or printed tended to cut out, or minimise, these elements. Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (1807) has an Antiochus who commits ‘a shocking deed … in secret’ that is never specified, and a Marina who is sold into slavery, not prostitution. George Lillo’s theatrical ...”

“... Normans’ name and origin myth date back to 911, when – according to Norman historians – Charles the Simple of France ceded the land between the river Epte and the sea to a Viking leader called Rollo or Rou (or, according to his own deeply unreliable saga, Hrolfr, known as Göngu-Hrolfr, or ‘Hrolf the Walker’, because he was so big that no horse ...”

“... but the work accomplished by Gertrude Jekyll in her mother’s now famous garden at Munstead Wood is assimilated into the above paragraph listing their achievements, and this and other houses whose gardens she worked on go unlisted in the appendix. Again, the élite head gardeners were themselves influenced by the unsung innovatory gardeners of great ...”

“... was present in a discussion of Piero by a colleague of Baxandall at the Warburg Institute, Charles Hope, published in the London Review of Books in March 1983 (Vol. 5, No 5). Both Baxandall and Hope point out that a function of this kind is hard to reconcile with the esoteric symbolism and concealed topical allusions which modern scholars tend to ...”

“... material of the novel, with the epigraphs for all its sections taken from the seventh edition of Charles Arnold-Baker’s Local Council Administration (2006). The election is important locally because of the disputed status of the Fields, a rundown area that is administratively shared with the encroaching city of Yarvil. The Fields represents the seething id ...”

“... gnome) made of gold, silver or brass, usually with a wooden head (so the owner could ‘touch wood’). These charms were worn on watch chains and as brooches or were hidden in the pocket of a service tunic. The swastika – a runic symbol of fortune and protection – was also popular. So were animal mascots – anything from a parrot to a tortoise to a ...”

“... of the rigours of a storm at sea in a hell of luxury look no further than Brideshead Revisited. Charles Ryder, desperate to commit adultery in the whirlwind, dare not trust himself to use a safety razor, so sends for the ship’s barber, a man with the agility of a swordsman in a ballet, who shaves him in bed with an open razor; meanwhile the crew are being ...”

“... traces its descent from the Norman Conquest; the numbering of monarchs dates from 1066. That Charles III’s great-uncle was the eighth King Edward, for instance, ignores Edward the Confessor, despite William the Conqueror claiming the throne as his kinsman as well as by his royal gift. From this perspective, the kingdom of England began in 1066. In ...”

“... rapidly making it the unchallenged capital of the world. Involved, because, like Dr Johnson and Charles Lamb, Scharf was a tireless London perambulator who desired no more from life (apart from a decent income) than to savour and capture the variety and energy of city living. Scharf (1788-1860) was an itinerant Bavarian artist whom the fortunes of war ...”