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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as Archbishop Fisher made clear to the House of Lords when backwoods peers staged a debate in the hope of getting rid of Johnson. Archbishop Lang had tried and failed; now Fisher, that flinty disciplinarian, offered Johnson the same deal: curb your public utterances or resign. Hewlett gaily rejected both options and sailed on, loathed by his canons, abhorred ...”

“... the Deep. There’s wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green; And Spanish ale shall give you hope, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope, Shall give you health, and help, and hope, My Dark Rosaleen! Later, I sang the poem in a setting by 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 ...”

“... the former and 28.7 per cent of the latter were killed. The death rate in bombers was exceptional. Charles Whiting, in his ’45: The Final Drive from the Rhine to the Baltic, provides repulsive detail which makes such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... a biographer, already manifest in his detailed and persuasive studies of Tennyson, FitzGerald and Charles Kingsley, are at their best in that rich Victorian ambience where religion, art and sex mingled in an unself-conscious totality. He several times takes for granted in criticism or exposition that Hopkins is one of the ‘great’ Victorian poets, but ...”

“... but seem to have decided which one to bag, as it were, well in advance. Louisa plumped for Charles, Alfred’s immediate elder brother, a sweet man and himself no mean poet, who proposed to join the Church, like his clever, embittered, alcoholic father. He also had his father’s taste for opium, and being married to Louisa seems to have done the habit ...”