“... I heard the sound of a piano.’ The pianist plays variations on the 25 variations that constitute Charles-Valentin Alkan’s Le Festin d’Ésope, a notoriously difficult work. Ludo, who has of course listened to all the available recordings of Le Festin d’Ésope, knows that this is something new. The pianist can only be Yamamoto. He deploys Devlin’s ...”

“... sky behind him, a painting long believed to be a portrait of Dr Johnson’s beloved black servant, Frank Barber. Houdon’s radiant patinated plaster head of a black woman of 1781, probably made in connection with a fountain group for an aristocrat’s garden, is another. Above all, there is the Portrait d’une Négresse exhibited at the Paris salon in 1800 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not. Houppert wonders whether menstruation could be the trigger for the drop in confidence: Anne Frank, for example, seems in the later, post-menarche pages of her diary, to become less sure of herself, more secretive and withdrawn, more conflicted about her early sexual longings. The changes of puberty are gradual, but as Simone de Beauvoir ...”

“... loans – provided by Tice – into donations. Fiona Cottrell, an old girlfriend of King Charles, has given £750,000 over the past year. Her son, George, who has served eight months in a US jail for wire fraud, is among Farage’s most trusted lieutenants.But while the prospect of $100 million from Musk has receded, there are signs that Reform is ...”

“... Maxim machine guns, Lee-Metford and Martini-Henry rifles – and deployed them unsparingly. Charles Townshend compared the Sudanese response to the Spartans’ heroics against the Persians: ‘No troops in the world could have lived under that fire. No Europeans would have faced it. The valour of those poor half-starved Dervishes in their patched jibbas ...”

“... object or occasion. Not that we don’t enjoy some of these essays, especially time-honoured ones: Charles Lamb on Shakespeare’s plays in relation to their stage representation is as delicious as it is dated. Yet unlike Lamb’s piece, the contemporary critical essay often demands a knowledge that is highly specialised, and uses a vocabulary drawn from ...”

“... written a lively, serviceable biography, but Chandler’s personal torments were made public in Frank McShane’s posthumously ‘authorised’ biography of 1975, and Hiney offers fundamentally the same account. The only child of an American father and an Anglo-Irish mother, Raymond Chandler was raised in England after his father abandoned the family. He ...”

“... of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ against Soviet totalitarianism. One of the rare dissenters, Charles Burton Marshall, is quoted here as saying that this bizarre operation to ‘counter Communism’ by trying ‘to break down ... doctrinaire thought patterns’ and anti-American attitudes throughout the world was ‘just about as totalitarian as one can ...”

“... and post-religious recovery, ranging from The Nemesis of Faith (1849) by his disciple and too frank biographer J.A. Froude to Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888). The German setting and European (and occasionally Asian and African) frame of reference seem to make this a cosmopolitan rather than an English or Scottish text. It was translated into Dutch in ...”

“... I finish my A-levels. I read the Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Tortured for Christ, and Frank Morison’s Who Moved the Stone? I read Nicky Cruz’s Run, Baby, Run, and books by Charles Colson, books which are still in print years after their first publication, Christian megasellers. I also spent a lot of time in ...”

“... overwhelmingly ignored. As a result, it is extremely difficult, and mostly impossible, to hold any frank discussion of the most important issue affecting the position of the US in the Middle East or the open sympathy for terrorism in the region. A passionately held nationalism usually has the effect of corrupting or silencing those liberal intellectuals who ...”

“... of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it came to vernacular music, Tippett invariably turned to America. Ragtime jitterbugged through the last movement of his Piano Sonata No. 1, completed as early ...”

“... appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A ...”

“... who were more interested in eating than talking and who thus presented less of a social peril. Charles Boyer, for example, who was appearing next door to us on 45th Street in Rattigan’s Man and Boy. With Leslie Howard he had been a particular heart-throb of Mam’s. Now, napkin tucked under his chin and in that all too imitable accent in which he’d ...”