“... was to make lists of celebrities unhappily transfixed in this way by the force of circumstance. Charles Féré, for example, wrote in 1892, citing B.A. Morel: ‘Who has not heard,’ says Morel, ‘of the febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II trembled at the sight of a naked ...”

“... traces its descent from the Norman Conquest; the numbering of monarchs dates from 1066. That Charles III’s great-uncle was the eighth King Edward, for instance, ignores Edward the Confessor, despite William the Conqueror claiming the throne as his kinsman as well as by his royal gift. From this perspective, the kingdom of England began in 1066. In ...”

“... Cavell’s widely influential study of screwball, Pursuits of Happiness (1981). Multimillionaire Charles ‘Hopsy’ Pike (Henry Fonda) is beguiled twice over by a temptress (Barbara Stanwyck) whom he encounters for the first time as Jean, a con artist working a cruise ship, and then as Lady Eve Sidwich, guest of honour at a party thrown in the Pike family ...”

“... would corroborate as autobiographical the coarse ‘racism’ we might feel disposed to see in the passage from the Voyage – if we exclude (as I think we have to) Joel Gold’s view that Johnson was trying to show that his Portuguese author was more racist than he was, a scenario as much conditioned by late 20th-century sensitivities as is its more obvious ...”

“... at the time, and had just learned a bit about the play in the volume of Shakespeare stories by Charles and Mary Lamb I had been given for Christmas a few months earlier. Mother’s idea was that she and I should gradually read through the play together. For that purpose a beautiful one-volume Shakespeare was brought down from the shelf, its handsome red ...”

“... in English.’ He felt strongly, he added, ‘that rhymes in English are too emphatic, and in a passage of any length this form of verse becomes tiring.’This section, he wrote,cost me far more time and trouble and vexation than any passage of the same length that I have ever written … It was chiefly that in this very ...”

“... while those with reservations, including the Popular Front critic F.O. Matthiessen and the poet Charles Olson, preferred to align him with Shakespeare, his revolutionary Miltonic essence giving way to a more properly tragic register, with its evocations of madness and fallibility (Lear is Olson’s big parallel) and over-reaching. This was, in a sense, to ...”

“... years has been moving in the direction of greater clarity, cogency and simplicity, he compares a passage from Our Mutual Friend, in which Dickens gives an amusing description of the Veneering family, Mr Podsnap and others in the Veneering dining room, with an account of a bad railway collision at Harrow in l952 and finds the 20th-century ...”

“... Where reason can revolt Without perdition, and loss assume all reason Without revolt ... The passage faithfully expresses, as much as any passage can, the strictly inexpressible tension which deconstructive readings claim to find in every text, literary or philosophical. But it also describes, perhaps aptly, the double ...”

“... as the title for a selection of essays derived from Frazer, George Watson quotes the following passage: In this sacred grove mere grew a certain tree round which ... a grim figure might be seen to prowl ... He was a priest and a murderer: and the man for whom he was looking was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was ...”

“... The anthology represents him by the section of ‘Little Gidding’ in which the spirits of Charles I and Milton are jointly invoked. The political tone here is relatively conciliatory, all the more so in the final text from which the poet dropped those conservative martyrs Richard III and the Duke of Wellington. Paulin has described Geoffrey Hill as ...”

“... said the veteran of Holding Out the Apple: ‘Do you mean Plinth Philip or Plinth Charles?’ But I would guess now that it was Oedipus, though rated a failure with Gielgud somewhat out of place in it, that gave him a new lease of life. He has always been a self-conscious man, his shyness masked by a bubbling stream of anecdote. Brook had ...”

“... Roberts (the naval captain who had overseen the building of the boat) and the ‘boat boy’, Charles Vivian. They made good time: ‘a run of 45 to 50 miles in seven hours and a half’, Williams noted in his journal. A week later, Shelley, Williams and Vivian embarked on the return voyage. At around half past six a storm hit and the boat went down with ...”

“... first sketches in Harper’s and Putnam’s. One of eight children, seven of them female, born to Charles Jarvis Woolson and Hannah Cooper Pomeroy Woolson (James Fenimore Cooper was her uncle) in the 1830s and 1840s, Constance arrived at adolescence with only a single sister, Clara, and a brother, Charles Jarvis Jr. Though ...”

“... Captain James Cook’s first circumnavigation of the world in the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John ...”