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“... rather than £24 million (the previous week’s total) or £10 million (the week before that)? As Martin Amis has pointed out in another context, though it is hard to say what difference would be made by having £40 million rather than £20 million at one’s disposal, it is easy enough to see that the difference is a cool £20 million. When the total reached ...”

“... took him from the ranks of the Parliamentary opposition in the 1620S through high office under Charles I to execution on Tower Hill. With the help of archival papers scattered between Sheffield, Dublin and California, the contributors are able to build up a new picture not just of the Earl of Strafford but, through him, of an entire period. At the other ...”

“... not the other. Kathleen Raine and Ruth Pitter cannot be found in O’Brien, but Elma Mitchell and Martin Bell cannot be found in Armitage and Crawford. Elma Mitchell’s ‘Thoughts after Ruskin’ is a revelation, and to put her in is to do exactly the sort of thing anthologies are meant to do: extend the terrain as they go over it. These books are also ...”

“... the poem as a ballade, a form much practised by that good friend of the Princess of Aquitaine’s, Charles d’Orléans. Much of Muldoon’s recent writing has been elaborately, even obsessively codified in this way, as in the rhyme schemes of ‘Yarrow’ and the sonnet sequence ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ that concludes Hay. In his combination of ...”

“... with the transformation of Louis-Philippe into a pear (poire – also French slang, fathead) by Charles Philipon, shortly to become the founder of Le Charivari. His fellow caricaturists joyfully took up the image, and the pear, in innumerable forms, became the emblem not only of the king but of his courtiers and ministers and all the avaricious speculators ...”

“... Metamagical Themas – an anagram of the formula ‘Mathematical Games’ used by his predecessor Martin Gardner, but also referring to the ‘metamathematics’ rooted in Gödel’s discovery. These columns are now collected together in this new book. But there is more to it than this, not only because of its new postscripts, but also because it embraces ...”

“... Calvin was buried long ago – in the great revivals of the early 19th century when preachers like Charles Grandison Finney taught that it was possible for people to redeem themselves by their own efforts. The followers of Mother Anne Lee, Joseph Smith and John Humphrey Noyes were all, in different ways, antinomian perfectionists who considered themselves free ...”

“... proposed digging trenches in the Sahara, filling them with kerosene and setting them ablaze. Charles Cros, a poet and inventor, petitioned the French government to fund the construction of a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the Martian and Venusian deserts, while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,000 francs to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research:   I shall be honoured, Mr Dickens.   Charles, if you please. We like friends to be friends. The Holmes series has attracted even more continuations than Edwin Drood – among them Stashower’s own attempt, The Adventures of the Ectoplasmic Man (1985), a historical whodunnit that imagines Houdini ...”

“... life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her defiance than teenage sulks. Her girlish wiles win her ...”

“... when we were in support. The Hun put over some shrapnel-registering shells, I think. Willie Martin and I were in command of Support trench with 3 platoons (Willie is our second captain – a ripping fellow, a regular officer) we got the men in dugouts and were returning to the telephone dugout. We heard the usual whizz and I dropped down and Willie ...”

“... conviction about his own high moral purpose. All this adds up to his being, in the phrase of Charles Moore, ‘the most pointlessly combative person in human history’. At one point someone at the Downing Street switchboard, ‘at the end of a not untypical day’, makes the mistake of asking him how he is, and Campbell replies that he feels ‘both ...”

“... instead a continuing struggle is variously played out between politicians such as Jack Lynch and Charles Haughey, the conservative Church and the women’s movement, or (less convincingly) the ‘big, mad children’ on both sides in the North and the grown-ups. The opposition is clearest in the contrast between Haughey and Garret FitzGerald. FitzGerald ...”

“... projects, this excessively long biography offers both ugly revelations and moving insights. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the son of Swiss parents, a father who enamelled watchcases and a piano teacher mother, Le Corbusier was a man of apparently absolute precision in everything he did, from his obsessive timekeeping to the organisation of his own ...”