“... of an ancient mariner, cursed by his fates and doomed to range eternally through the world without hope of port or saviour.Johnson seemed destined to remain a cipher. But, incredibly, it turns out there’s a person who still recalls him quite clearly, his stepsister, Annye C. Anderson, now 96. ‘First time I remember Brother Robert,’ she says in her ...”

“... expression and modernism.’ There was, rather, a continuum of architecture and sculpture. In 1931 Charles Reilly, sometime head of the Liverpool School of Architecture, published Representative British Architects of the Present Day, which, Stamp notes, ‘is representative of the period by being so very unrepresentative’. He ascribes the conspicuous absence ...”

“... of a local dry cleaner. They moved to Cincinnati. She named the baby after her dead father, Charles. She was 16. And she was still a bit wild. She kept going out most nights, and after three years William divorced her for ‘gross neglect of duty’. She filed a bastardy suit against Scott, and won $5 a month in child support. She got $25 on her day in ...”

“... fate to have stick to him all the pornographic and profane verse that emanated from the court of Charles II. Abstruse pornography has always had a special appeal for scholars, or rather did have, as long as they were unmated males living a collegiate existence. Most scholars are still loth to give up their frigged-out version of Rochester. Eleven years after ...”

“... disempowerment. To such Americans, the Federal Government has appeared, in the words of Senator Charles Sumner, a 19th-century advocate of black rights, not as a danger to liberty but as the ‘custodian of freedom’. Brands’s single-minded concern with the relationship between war, powerful government and liberalism does have the virtue of providing the ...”

“... of a young girl; and finally his journey back to Shanghai after the Japanese invasion, in the hope of tracking down the criminals involved in the novel’s central mystery. The only constant in Banks’s life is his aspiration ‘to be a “Sherlock” ’ and this novel seems to return us to the Shanghai of Auden and Isherwood and to the fictional worlds ...”

“... another paperback writer has proved to be more of an embarrassment than Platell could ever hope to be. One does not envy Platell her new job – look at the material she has to work with – but perhaps she has had enough of the ‘sexy and scandalous’ world of journalism. I, too, would like to think that the world of journalism was sexy and ...”

“... that year, however, with the arrival of Howard K. Beale.Beale was a disciple of the historian Charles Beard, who taught that political ideology was a mask for economic self-interest. Beale had recently published The Critical Year, in which he followed Beard in viewing the Civil War not as a struggle over slavery but as a second American Revolution, which ...”

“... but with that surname, a cockerel with a weak r, a Wooster trying to be a Rooster, he could never hope to be a hit with the ladies. As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom double-barrelled names tend to be for dimbos): no one with a name quite so obviously heedless could enjoy more ...”

“... are sincere and eloquent. They are honest, diplomatic, realistic, but with a painful undertone of hope. There were a few happy months in Geneva together with Mary and Shelley; but when Claire became pregnant Byron acknowledged paternity (‘she has had a good deal of that same with me’) and refused to see her again. Although for a long time Claire’s ...”

“... to leave the table          when love is no longer being served –          Charles Aznavour said that: I’m not saying it. And while I’m not saying a form of words couldn’t be found I still think of them two blokes e.g. in Boards of Study at the Russell Group institution where I am currently on probation as I bask in the glare of ...”

“... Christians thought it would come in 1000, 17th-century Christians in 1666, Cotton Mather in 1736, Charles Wesley in 1794, Mother Shipton in 1881, Pierre Lachèze in 1900 and Jim Jones in 1967. The end of the great plague of 2020 may be in sight, but doomsday predictions come thick and fast these days. The ‘sixth mass extinction event’, the election of ...”

“... wasn’t just a symbol of empire but was actually built on the proceeds of slavery. In 1660, Charles II had incorporated the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. Its charter gave the company possession of coastal West Africa from Cape Blanco, at the northern end of what is now Mauritania, to the Cape of Good ...”

“... relations, energy security and global trade are explored in The Future History of the Arctic by Charles Emmerson.* But the idea that a thawing Arctic is something to be afraid of would have baffled our ancestors. For the men who sailed from Europe in search of a northwest passage, and for the men who sent them, the ice was what there was to fear, and a ...”

“... on, Foden’s narrator, Henry Meadows, quotes a line attributed to Einstein: ‘Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.’ (With what turns out to be habitual pedantry, Meadows notes that the line has also been ascribed to Heisenberg and von ...”