“... 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 ...”

“... Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender ...”

“... most fashionable of environmental causes. There were international petitions and boycotts; Prince Charles and Al Gore were outspoken in their support. The campaign pivoted around the figure of Manser, the ‘Wild Man of Borneo’ or ‘Swiss Tarzan’, whose life possessed a Conradian glamour rarely glimpsed in an age of jet travel and media ...”

“... Disaster at the Trebia’) or the mortally wounded soldier – in this case, the poet’s ancestor Charles Russell Lowell – having himself tied on to his horse. Something about these often garish poems is half-grown and not quite serious. It is even possible that the best of it is an outrageous silliness, as here in ‘Attila, Hitler’: ‘Attila mounted on ...”

“... most remarkable recent acquisitions. Dickens was certainly familiar with the paintings of Charles Eastlake, the keeper of the National Gallery between 1843 and 1847. Eastlake was the leading British painter of fierce brigands and distressed contadine – the latter more convincing than the former – and had sent many examples to London during his ...”

“... As Julius demonstrates, he denied the redemptive nature of art in his 1928 Preface to The Sacred Wood, where he asserts that poetry is a ‘superior amusement’. Later in the same paragraph, he says: ‘And certainly poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics; and no more is it religion or an equivalent of religion, except by some ...”

“... British art schools were in the stained glass department, overseen by a dynamic young teacher, Charles Carey. Boty’s switch of disciplines was, Kristal suggests, ‘the most important choice of her creative life’. Carey was an inspiring teacher and stained glass was having a moment in the avant-garde. Almost the only form of decoration acceptable to ...”

“... Last autumn, at the award ceremony of the 1994 Turner Prize, Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate ...”

“... None in this genre is as good as Ogden Nash’s ‘Termite’. Some primal termite knocked on wood And tasted it, and found it good; And that is why your Cousin May Fell through the parlour floor today. (Included in Watts but not in Logue.) It has the calm acceptance of fatality that is the essential of a Ruthless Rhyme, but the added parody of a ...”

“... for a hypothetical reader, rather than as and for himself. ‘Took Brother Tournade to Combe Wood to see and gather bluebells, which we did, but fell in blue-handed with a gamekeeper, which is a humbling thing to do.’ That seems almost intended to be shared with Brother Tournade, whoever he was. In the same way, though much more touchingly, Dorothy ...”

“... it was (and is) a wonderful grandstand. The land feels eager to be eroded all over New Zealand. Charles Andrew Cotton, a local pioneer of geomorphology could illustrate most generalities of what erosion does to landforms with native examples. All my New Zealand years I lived at 13 Pitt Street with my parents and sisters. (As you walk down, the odd numbers ...”

“... him ‘Sylva’, so closely did they identify him with his famous book. Describing himself as ‘Wood-born’, he was the ideal author for the Royal Society’s first official publication. Although it started life as a report to the naval authorities on the state of the nation’s timber, he turned it into a paean to trees, offering advice on every aspect of ...”

“... of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert Filmer, which claimed that absolute monarchy ...”