“... is a reliable guide here, and Philippe-Alain Michaud has covered as many bases as a curator can hope to do. His show at Beaubourg is planned in the manner of a defensive shield: incoming criticisms probing for gaps will simply bounce off, detonating in the ether once they encounter his dome of contingencies and associations, fashioned from a wealth of ...”

“... on the mysteries: ‘an owl, Glaucidium borneense, “about the size of one’s thumb”, as [Charles] Hose described it, which calls poop-te-poop-poop’; or a tiny hawk, Microhierax, which lays ‘a large white egg about as big as itself’. The book’s very form – the palimpsest of prose from so many predecessors-makes plain one fundamental impulse ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a volume written as an exercise in academic sociology. This was Art Students Observed (1973), by Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, part of Faber’s Society Today and Tomorrow series. The authors’ research was funded by the Social Science Research Council. One suspects that Madge took the leading role in the book, not only because of seniority but ...”

“... more so when we know that they would have been recognised as the extremities of the skeleton of ‘Charles O’Brien’, the Irish Giant. O’Brien’s skeleton was one of Hunter’s most famous specimens. From the first, there were dark stories about how it was obtained. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, bodies had to be procured either from the hangman or by ...”

“... founding families, are fairly heavy on Kerry’s mother’s side and his kinsman Robert Charles Winthrop was a senator for Massachusetts in 1850. Lowell’s portrait of that society, ‘91 Revere Street’, creaks with patrician relatives and Edwardian furniture, people with large trust funds and profound neuroses, ‘an unspoiled faith in the ...”

“... at first in the room that had been his father’s, and then in a secure cell, an oubliette. Louis-Charles died (or perhaps he didn’t) in the custody of the state. Perhaps he was rescued, and a substitute or changeling died instead? If he survived, where did he go, and what became of him? Out of the mystery of this missing child – one missing child among ...”

“... is very uncertain when it will be disengaged. My Family send their best Respects to You.   I hope Sir your little Son is quite well.          From yours Respectfully                    S Walker A Scottish drunkard called Bell, who was involved in the divorce proceedings, told Mrs Hazlitt that ‘he had seen some ...”

“... rock star whose lyrics reunite Spanish and Arabic – does. This should be a time of hope in Syria. When the old President died three years ago, Syrians sensed the possibility of escape from the deadening, if steady, hand with which he had governed most aspects of their lives. Power in what many deride as a ‘hereditary republic’ passed to his ...”

“... and crucify Christ: this I have (for my good, no doubt) experienced in my own case. It is my hope, however, that my life and character will so become known to posterity that I may be counted among those who have suffered much for the sake of truth. This is audacious to the point of poignancy – Kelley the sufferer for truth; the sacrificed ...”

“... Jane Austen’s version of a work she had admired from childhood, Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. It was actually a discovery only in a manner of speaking, since the manuscript was never properly lost. It had been handed down among the descendants of Jane Austen’s niece Anna Lefroy, born Anna Austen in 1793, the eldest child of Jane ...”

“... though. The historian Marcel Thomas uses it in his remarkable book, published in 1989, on Charles Marie Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy, the man who was the spy that Alfred Dreyfus wasn’t. Thomas is thinking of Esterhazy’s acquittal in 1898. Why would a French military tribunal find a guilty man innocent? What was the point of this ‘ritual ...”

“... It was. The Deys of Algiers subsisted on the profits of slaving and piracy, and according to Charles-André Julien’s Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1964), the country was exploitatively ruled by a Turkish minority and the absolute power of the Dey depended on the military support of the Janissary regiment. ...”

“... affected by it are likely to have been precisely those whose fathers were closest to the exiled Charles II, and who were therefore most likely to be catapulted to social prominence after 1660. Moreover, no amount of explaining Rochester’s personal circumstances will explain why he appears to have spoken to the condition of many of his contemporaries. It ...”

“... pervasive, if not cataclysmic resonances of war. The first serious study of 20th-century Britain, Charles Loch Mowat’s Britain between the Wars (1955), neatly managed, as the title indicates, to steer between the century’s two total wars. Liberal British historians found wars very nasty and preferred either to avoid them altogether or to keep them in ...”