“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the doctor holds unquestioned narrative authority here. Stripped of myth, emotion and false hope, ‘death is simply an event in the sequence of nature’s ongoing rhythms.’ These rhythms are modulated by the processes of ageing and by the pathophysiology of particular diseases or injuries – heart disease, stroke, cancer, Aids, Alzheimer’s and ...”

“... resisting it. The boy in question was probably Barbauld’s adopted son (and biological nephew) Charles Rochemont Aikin, who bore his mother’s maiden name as his surname and took his father’s first name as his middle name. (Miss Aikin married Rochemont Barbauld, a teacher of Huguenot descent, in 1774.) Such latticework sums up the complex, loving and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... over Westlands were attributed to those civil servants such as Mr Bernard Ingham and Mr Charles Powell whom Mrs Thatcher sees many times each day. Isn’t this something we should be concerned about? Three decades after Crichel Down, however, all the House of Commons and the country seem to do is to shrug its collective shoulders. Part of the ...”

“... a mystical appreciation of Tibetan culture, inspiring him to found the World Congress of Faiths. Charles Howard-Bury, the leader of the 1921 expedition, lived a life normally found only in boys’ adventure stories, that of a war hero, explorer and spy fluent in 27 languages. Charles Bell became a friend of the Dalai Lama ...”

“... them – and in the end reluctantly accepted the only offer going. Malta was an informal part of Charles V’s newly acquired kingdom of Sicily. The main island and its smaller neighbour, Gozo, had very little water. The rocky soil grew few crops. The scant fortifications were badly sited. The citadels, despite reinforcements, presented easy targets to ...”

“... be found in newspaper offices. Matters came to a head early in 1982 when both the Deputy Editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and the Managing Editor, John Grant, tendered their resignations. The Chairman refused to accept them, and instead asked Evans for his resignation and appointed Douglas-Home to succeed him. After a few days of disorder on the editorial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of government, they still nourish an opposition mentality, and because they have attracted no-hope fringe groups. But in all except inessentials, mainstream Liberal Democrats resemble mainstream social democrats the world over, which leaves little to say about them doctrinally. The literature on the postwar Liberals is not inconsiderable, but it is ...”

“... is the second and final volume, is not the only one – and there will soon be an official one by Charles Moore. It will, however, be difficult to trump. Its argument is always fair and judicious: Thatcher-haters will be just as disappointed as devotees. The book begins in 1979, the year Thatcher became prime minister, and covers her active political life ...”

“... Richard Horne wrote an epic poem, Orion, the year before Turner exhibited Rain, Steam and Speed. Charles Lamb’s version of the Odyssey appeared in 1808: ‘Then came by a thundering ghost, the large-limbed Orion, the mighty hunter, who was hunting there the ghosts of the beasts which he had slaughtered in desert hills upon the earth.’ ‘Blind Orion ...”