“... to elope. After this the quest for a respectable husband became urgent. It settled on William King, later earl of Lovelace. The marriage was based on real affection and was a considerable success for some time, although the bride of science made no secret of the fact that she found children, including her own, boring. ‘The less I have habitually to do ...”

“... are, not what you pretend to be. You, Wystan, will find him very soon, within three months. You, Christopher, will have to wait much longer for yours ... At present he is only four years old.If looking for Mr Right was what it was, this celebrated voyage that put paid to a decade, it was lucky that Auden’s quest so soon found its object. Otherwise the ...”

“... were prone to seek revenge. Arthur Dobbs deliberately set out to ruin the career and reputation of Christopher Middleton, who came back from Hudson Bay with news that there was no passage to the west. Dalrymple’s exasperation found an outlet in two public letters he wrote against John Hawkesworth, Cook’s editor; and of Cook himself, he observed: ‘I ...”

“... study of poetry’, composes ‘a neat, choice, and curious poem’, which he presents to Sir Christopher Clutchfist – only to discover, later, his ‘book dismembered very tragically’ by Clutchfist, who was only interested in its rich binding and carnation silk strings. Unlike Shakespeare’s ‘unlucky’ Cinna, Middleton’s Nashe, Ant and ...”

“... a study of Wells’s composition methods, H.G. Wells under Revision (1990, co-edited with Christopher Rolfe), and the reissue of Wells’s scientific romances currently appearing under the World’s Classics imprint. (For copyright reasons – Wells having died in 1946 – this series will probably only be available in America.) Parrinder’s more ...”

“... The implication, perhaps, is that the 1980s were judged by the two editors, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, to be likely to rate correctness of language above its political and social implications, while the 1990s will reverse these priorities. There is little point in taking issue with this, since in practice such divisions don’t hold fast: most ...”

“... presence of two anti-boy women ... complicated the atmosphere, because Benjamin likes to be with Christopher and Wystan, all boys together without disturbing foreign elements such as slightly hostile ladies and gentlemen hostile to gay music.’ Pears sang a song which Britten had made from one of Spender’s poems, ‘a very Stephenish one full of slightly ...”

“... are all he has been allocated to deal with the vast subject of ‘the war and German society’, Christopher Friedrichs mentions the diary of Hans Heberle, a shoemaker from a village near Ulm, but he hasn’t the space for quotations, or indeed anything more than a summary of the problems involved in assessing the damage done by thirty years of ...”

“... world dominance of Christianity. America comes into the act with recent scholarship arguing that Christopher Columbus – in his self-appointed task as Christoferens, of Christ-bearer – relied heavily on works which connected great conjunctions with change in empires. He noted the rulership of Saturn over India, and copied out a passage of a work deriving ...”

“... born’. Death, ever strict in his arrest, may even take to parading through the streets like a king. Thus Tamburlaine, the very emblem of mortality, sweeps through the world like a pestilential scourge of God, riding ‘in triumph’ over the carcasses of those he has slain. Of course, death ultimately claims Tamburlaine himself, and his growing awareness ...”

“... could cite the odd tag from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus’s assertion ‘let there be one king’ was a favourite), but even literate people would have had only a general idea that the Odyssey was about a magical journey home and that the Iliad was about war. The few who actually read Homer at this time tended to read Latin translations, such as those ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... is captured by the Japanese in Malaya and is murdered on a jungle march, and his younger brother Christopher, with extraordinary persistence – bombarding the Air Ministry with letters and making the journey to Malaysia, questioning villagers all along the death-route – manages to track down the grave. One is gripped and would be glad to have been offered ...”

“... Allen is another Thirties man. Senior to Mr Symons by less than a year, he was the first boy from King Edward’s Grammar School, Ashton, ever to attempt Oxford entrance, being sent up to Balliol as a candidate for a scholarship in English literature. He failed to win it, but describes the occasion in the first of many scintillating set-pieces of ...”

“... voices and having visions. The conclusion of the Civil Wars and the imminent execution of the king drove him into a chiliastic frenzy in which he anticipated the Second Coming and the conversion of England into a paradise for saints. His visions were erratic and his millenarianism combined strands of two usually incompatible sets of ...”