“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of ‘forensic botany’. One of the earliest is the Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932, where the wood grain in remnants of the homemade wooden ladder used to abduct the twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr was compared with that of floorboards in the suspect’s attic. Another, from the 1980s, is a murder case in which ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on a drawing made at the morgue, shows the founder of the German Communist Party already turned to wood: as the two ploughmen dig their graves, so Liebknecht merges with his coffin. He becomes an altar for the mourners who hover over him.Kollwitz modelled this image on the dead Christ, a recurrent theme among old German masters such as Holbein and Dürer, and ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... the words were ‘insufferable’ and enters into a warm and indeed emotional friendship with Charles Summers: but the remark gives the general tone. He is soon known as Lord Talbot. Among the remainder of the passengers there is a dissolute old painter called Brocklebank and his alleged wife and daughter, a waning theatrical beauty with whom Talbot has a ...”

“... a commodity broker. But then he arranged new vacuum-cleaners in a perspex case and sold them to Charles Saatchi. ‘It is my belief,’ announces Januszczac, that art today is largely in the business of supplying frisson, little niblets of existential uncertainty, ways of not-knowing, mysteries, small after-hours pleasures for overworked urban minds ...”