“... there is the mindless good cheer that can only lead to tears: ‘Prostate Cancer: A Journey of Hope’, Public Television promises. I can hardly wait. And every Tuesday the ‘Science Times’ invites readers to embrace or reject yet another food or beverage so as to prevent this cancer or that form of heart disease. In the beginning, Porter reminds ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of innocent dead, it will be the response of a nation merely. I fear that we may do that, but hope that we will not. By what we do now, and what we refrain from doing, we ought to wish to be seen to act on behalf of the human nature from which the agents of terror have cut themselves off. In the days after the planes hit, the US appeared to be governed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been the downfall of the Romans at Cannae. Very different men though they were, Marlborough and Charles XII, Napoleon and Wellington, shared the same dedicated professionalism and the same will to win. Charles of Sweden was in his own mad way the most remarkable of the lot, and the one who in the end did most damage to ...”

“... as early as 1607, and sporadic digging had taken place from 1689. But it was not till 1734, when Charles III of Naples became interested in the sites, that anything like serious investigation was begun, under the direction of an engineer from Spain, Rocco Gioacchino de Alcubierre. Alcubierre was interested only in treasure-hunting; eager only to find statues ...”