“... no more than blocks of expanded polystyrene. Patriarchal authority, as it turned out, was balsa wood under the mahogany veneer. That first night Dad was stricken but not rejecting. When we finally went to bed he said everything would be all right. There was no hug but then he wasn’t huggy. There was no sense of a hug withheld. His wish of ‘Happy New ...”

“... dismay, after going over my life, that I have no philosophy.’ Some respite came when H. Harvey Wood, the Scottish representative of the British Council, persuaded it to employ Edwin to organise lecture programmes for overseas troops – principally Polish, Czech and French – in Edinburgh. The Muirs moved to the city in 1942 and played host to many ...”

“... to women’s clothes, and she may have been a bit too soft on our awkward but admirable ally, Charles de Gaulle. This peccadillo cannot fairly be compared with Unity addressing two hundred thousand Nazis at Hesselberg, alongside Streicher, and telling them: ‘I want everyone to know that I am a Jew-hater.’ No wonder Nancy’s sighing letters address ...”

“... and has had no child? Why is the letter from the father announcing his wife’s death signed Charles when his real name was Pierre? Because this is a nouvelle nouvelle we are to be reminded by these hiccups in the narrative that we are reading fiction and there is no through road to fact. The disclaimer is all the more needed because Contre-Jour has a ...”

“... 1919 invited the local MPs, one Conservative and one Labour, to inspect the estate. Kingsley Wood, Tory member for West Woolwich, commissioned a surveyor’s report which found that the rents were too high and the complaints, especially about damp and condensation, ‘fully justified’. It recommended repairs and rent reductions. The Ministry of ...”

“... of the body.’ The transition to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical ...”

“... man of destiny escaped from Ham wearing a labourer’s smock and hiding his face behind a plank of wood. He fled to London, where he signed up as a special constable and helped to control Chartist demonstrators. After the 1848 Revolution, he returned to France, determined to take charge of the new Republic – ‘dreaming, as usual’, according to his cousin ...”

“... tribe. Imelda Marcos visited and declared herself a changed person; so did Gina Lollobrigida and Charles Lindbergh. National Geographic came and went twice. Everyone who visited the Tasaday was ravished by the remote setting and touched by the group’s affectionate spontaneity. For their part the Tasaday became deeply attached to John Nance and positively ...”

“... they claim, was a newly hatched rationalism running around with the shell on its head. As Charles Taylor wrote in A Secular Age, the Reformation was ‘central to … the abolition of the enchanted cosmos and the eventual creation of a humanist alternative to faith’. This is the influential master narrative to whose attempted demolition Alexandra ...”

“... very different kinds of poet too: Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, Octavio Paz, Louis Zukofsky and Charles Olson. As did any number of critics: Edmund Wilson, Harry Levin, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport. Were all of them hornswoggled, taken in by the surface polish and acrobatics of Cummings’s style and, those who knew him, by his great ...”

“... the Venerable Bede, and its modern exponents include such engaging and stylish writers as Charles Thomas, Leslie Alcock and Henry Mayr-Harting. The literary sources have attracted much idiosyncratic talent, for they possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman Conquest forgery from dimly ...”

“... are wonderful descriptions of the famous and the infamous – Timothy Leary, Warhol, Ginsberg, Charles Laughton, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Thom Gunn, the Reagans, Leslie Caron, Nehru – but it’s their performance that’s gossiped about, not their morals. When he describes people it’s as if he’s making notes ...”

“... George Robey, Harry Lauder, Dan Leno and Vesta Tilley rubbed shoulders with the likes of Sir Henry Wood, Sarah Bernhardt and the Ballets Russes. Dickens was fascinated by the performing style of Charles Mathews, a blacked-up minstrel, and put it to use in his own public readings, though without the burned cork. T.S. Eliot ...”

“... than more powerful productions.’ Felicia Hemans was huge in America, where Andrews Norton (Charles Eliot Norton’s father) offered her a prestigious job editing a literary periodical in Boston, which she turned down. Despite speaking five languages she never left the British Isles. Nor did she ever stop writing: between 1808, when her first book ...”

“... to be chipped away from the ice in the boat. They tried to make a fire, but had no hatchet to cut wood. The party lay exposed to the cold all night. Everyone except the girl and one frostbitten man died. Their Indian rescuers hacked graves from the solid earth. We now know that it really was much colder back then. The early modern ...”