“... It would be fascinating to know what these looked like and what Vasari meant by ‘simple’ (the passage is not discussed in this book), but the implication seems to be that his usual style would have been wasted on such a public. We know that he despised the sort of realism in which Flemish painters excelled and which, he is supposed to have said, women ...”

“... handing back Yorick’s skull to the gravedigger, an inspired prankster yells out: ‘Wai-ter.’ Charles Baudelaire had, it might be argued, a more authentic claim to the inky cloak and cosmic melancholy of the troubled prince than any other writer of the era. His much loved father, Joseph-François Baudelaire, died when he was only five, and for a blissful ...”

“... joined a group called Pat T. Cake and His Mighty Panthers. Soul music was coming into its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll ...”

“... the new Post-Modern order: though he never fell into the historical pastiche of Michael Graves or Charles Moore, he did become more imagistic in his design. The great interest of this retrospective is to trace his passage from the early grunge work, through an elliptical Pop style, to the lavish ‘gestural aesthetic’ of ...”

“... incidents in her life to those in his; Fanny Burney much later edited the Memoirs of her father, Charles Burney, introducing material related to herself as incidental. The best models of female autobiography were fictional. Delariviere Manley, who came closest to writing a (defensive) autobiography, produced her short and juicy work under a light fictional ...”

“... loved of Ezra Pound has been said, and continues to be said, of the poets and poetries loved of Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman – two of the most important and influential of these new American writers. The anthologies edited by Silliman and Douglas Messerli contain a great deal of unpleasant and difficult poetry – for example, this ...”

“... Heart of Darkness, and ‘ou-boom’, the meaningless echo in the Marabar Caves in Forster’s A Passage to India, the complexity of both Africa and India reduced to hushed, disyllabic sounds. In history and the popular imagination, another two syllables, ‘black hole’, have come to express the idea that, for the Westerner, Calcutta is still beyond ...”

“... in the sermon – perhaps what it had to say about libels against those in power – unsettled Charles I, who asked to see a text. The dean nervously scrutinised it for political error: ‘I have cribrated [sifted], and recribrated, and post-cribrated the Sermon,’ he declared anxiously, and his ‘recribrations’ (the neologism – which Stubbs ...”

“... released – a brilliantly elegant idea first attested around 1430 in a chamber clock belonging to Charles of Burgundy. By 1488 Ludovico Sforza could commission a pendant watch so small that it could be worn around the neck, sounding the hours with a tiny bell. In the 15th century, they were already living in the future.Contemporaries were dazzled by the ...”

“... In 1904​ Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume ...”

“... the mid-18th century; but despite a lineage that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly ...”

“... Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned here, and Charles Mackerras), friends and acquaintances suddenly turned into living corpses if they overstepped the mark. A joke would do it, and though Britten seems to have had plenty of childish jokes with his boy singers, his sense of humour isn’t much in evidence ...”

“... as shorthand for an unwieldy and dangerous entity created from ill-assorted bits and pieces. As Charles Robinson notes in his new edition of the novel, such confusion set in soon after the book’s first publication in 1818. In October 1823, at a masked ball in Liverpool, a local newspaper reported: ‘Mr Harris, of Preston, personated (we are ...”

“... son-in-law Ali, venerated by Shiites as the first imam. In 1649, not long after the execution of Charles I, the first English translation of the Quran appeared. Its Royalist translator had intended to dedicate the book to the king, as Matthew Dimmock noted in Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture; after the regicide, he added a ...”

“... In some instances, we might wish we knew the questions that sparked his answers. Writing to thank Charles Dodgson for a photographic portrait taken on a visit to Christ Church in January 1861, Faraday offered the following notes on Dodgson’s (lost) queries: The ammonia comes from the cheese evolved by a slow action analogous to decay. You may see the ...”