“... of psychic instability. Edward entered a home for the insane at 19 and died there 60 years later, Charles went in for opium, Arthur for alcohol. Septimus would introduce himself to a stranger by rising from the hearthrug where he had been lying, extending a languid hand, and saying: ‘I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.’ The daughters were ...”

“... charge is directed, fittingly, by descendants of the generals: the Duke of Wellington, HIH Prince Charles Napoléon and HSH Prince Blücher von Wahlstatt. At Hougoumont as it looks now, sitting in open, rolling country, it is difficult to understand why the French didn’t simply overrun it. But the history of battles is often as much about landscape as ...”

“... board rarely seem or sound like Americans, and that Pfeiffer can seem at times like some rite-of-passage Etonian roughing it, and lucking out, on his adventures. The book nevertheless carries conviction as an account of what fishermen are like, on shore and off, and what the practice of fishing amounts to. The plain, clear prose is not unlike that of another ...”

“... faith was horribly called in question by the works of his (later enormously famous) passenger Charles Darwin. And there’s a third layer, a tribute to the other Victorians, in the form of Dodgson’s Alice, a mad hatter’s tea-party set in a pastoral landscape, where Charlotte (or one of the people she’s split into) converses looking-glass style with ...”

“... The first version belongs to the 1890s and was conceived as a vehicle for her favourite performer, Charles Hawtrey. She had acquired the English rights in a successful French comedy which satirised the pose of decadence in Fin-de-Siècle society and centred on a ludicrously morbid suicide-pact. Her adaptation was full of paradoxical epigrams in the manner of ...”

“... about Von Stauffenberg’s disgusting treachery be given the airing that history requires? As for Charles Colson, surely beyond any disagreement one of the more poisonous of the little vipers clamouring at liberty’s battered bosom during those grisly two years of the second administration, not even Longford can actually deny that he had been a bit ...”

“... The joint life of Lewis and Benjamin is a latterday example of that ‘double singleness’ of Charles Lamb and his sister which is discussed in the preceding article. And if Mary was Charles’s little lamb (names do have a strange and relentless relevance), Lewis, in much the same cruel world, is Benjamin’s. Benjamin ...”

“... expanded significantly during the 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new king, Charles II, and his brother, the future James II. In 1665, it was James’s eagerness to capture Dutch slave-trading forts on the West African coast that set off the second Anglo-Dutch war. In the last quarter of the century, English ships carried almost 300,000 ...”

“... was in Wales. The Holyhead Road has been the subject of a number of excellent studies, notably by Charles G. Harper more than a century ago, and more recently in a report for the Council for British Archaeology by Barrie Trinder, Jamie Quartermaine and Rick Turner. The need for a new road between Holyhead and London became apparent with the Act of Union of ...”

“... without plumping for any in particular, though he pays some respect to a proposal by Charles Thomas, a great scholar of early British Christianity, that Bannavem was a place on Hadrian’s Wall now called Birdoswald. Birdoswald consisted of a wall-fort and an adjacent civilian settlement of the modest variety called a vicus, the very word used by ...”

“... most celebrated headmasters suddenly, and for no obvious reason, resigned his job. The Rev. Charles Vaughan had taken charge at Harrow in 1845, when the school was close to collapse. There were just 69 boys on the roll (many of whom were seriously in debt to the local loan shark); even by Victorian standards the boys’ lodgings were a health ...”

“... explorers. Indeed, the loss of Sir John Franklin and his party during his search for the Northwest Passage in the 1840s only further fuelled the imaginative drama of the ice. Lady Jane Franklin, reminding the nation of her husband’s heroism with her own heroic bearing, whipped up sympathy and money for years of searching which finally located the bodies of ...”

“... have free men, equal in rights.’ In a letter to a friend, the stonemason and ‘worker-poet’ Charles Poncy, she described her feelings: ‘I spent nights without sleeping, days without sitting down. You are crazy, you are drunk, you are happy to fall asleep in the mire and to wake up in heaven … The Republic has been won. It is assured.’ But the ...”

“... by an emblematic expedition inland to Canton by a route through the delta (the Broadway or Inner passage) hitherto closed to Westerners. But ‘cultural and material processes’ is too leaden a term to encumber this incident with: Mo’s descriptions are superbly vivid, and the expedition is as gripping as a Boy’s Own Paper adventure. The paddle-steamer ...”

“... of the hermit’s face comes ‘from his contact with the pillar of fire’. Then there is a passage in The French Lieutenant’s Woman where Charles is talking to someone or something in an empty church, and getting responses. The dialogue is set out in that Q.-and-A., stichomythia style we find in A Maggot. ...”