“... industrial countries, were then pressured or persuaded into agreement, a process described by Charles Goodhart in his book on the history of the committee.2 At the core of the 1988 Basel Accord on Capital Adequacy (‘Basel I’, as it is now known) is an apparently straightforward rule, named for the then chair of the Basel Committee, the Bank of ...”

“... a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or soil it for ever: for every Nelson Mandela, there is an Aung San Suu Kyi. Greta Thunberg at 16 is one thing, but it is hard to picture her going at it with the same intensity at ...”

“... was too small for its burgeoning contents. Leopold had already foreseen this and commissioned Charles Girault, the architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, to design a larger building, which opened in 1910, a year after Leopold’s death. The museum, which remained a monument to his imperial genius, was also a hub of ‘scientific’ endeavour and a ...”

“... with reserve, fitted into a preconceived pattern which differs little from that laid down by Martin Esslin a generation ago, with its presentation of a man caught between the twin evils of Communism and Fascism. The most interesting part of Hayman’s book deals with Brecht’s early life in Augsburg, which the biographer clearly finds more congenial ...”

“... Darker jokes, which do have to do with the appetite for violence, flicker around memories of Charles Manson. Mickey worries that his TV ratings are lower than those for a Manson programme, but consoles himself: ‘Yeah, it’s pretty hard to beat the king.’ A group of interviewees for the TV show, identified in the screenplay simply as ‘three ...”

“... includes a reference to ‘anaesthetic tables’), William James, James Thomson, William Acton, Charles-Louis Philippe, W.R. Burnett (a crime novelist in whose High Sierra – published in 1940 – the phrase ‘She was … a one-night-stand type’ occurs), Edward Winslow Martin (author of The Secrets of the Great ...”

“... called Charlie Laughton whom he first met in a bar (not to be confused with the British actor Charles Laughton). Pacino writes that he ‘knew’ straightaway that Laughton, who worked at the Herbert Berghof Studio, was destined to be his teacher. Laughton, who was described as a ‘sensory’ acting coach, became a father figure to Pacino (he was about ...”

“... to Nancy Drew or Tom Sawyer as an ‘innocent abroad’. Badlands was loosely based on the case of Charles Starkweather, who went on a killing spree in Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s together with his teenage girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. In the movie Holly meets Kit (Martin Sheen) in a South Dakota town: ‘Little ...”

“... reality, brought to the heart of European cities or visited on Korea, Cambodia or Vietnam. In 1869 Charles Dilke wrote that ‘the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind,’ and with ghoulish eugenist fervour praised Anglo-Saxons as ‘the only extirpating race on earth’. Bombing was first thought of ...”

“... cases this was her father: we might think of Christine de Pizan, whose father was astrologer to Charles V of France, or Damaris Masham, whose father was Ralph Cudworth, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge from 1645. Anna Maria Van Schurman began her Latin tract on Women’s Aptitude for Knowledge and Higher Learning (or, as the English translation ...”

“... Murdoch novel (as she herself batted around Oxford, gown flying). There is a bicycle silhouette by Charles Mozley on the spine of the dust jacket for The Sandcastle. English schoolmasters, in the sad twilight, disappointed and damply lustful, trundle over gravel to reach ‘the smooth tarmac surface of the arterial road’. Wicker basket. Tweed jacket. Bicycle ...”

“... aside, Bernhardt always had a soft spot, she said, for the entire Bonaparte family); Charles Haas (elegant model for Proust’s Swann); ‘Bertie’, the cuddly future Edward VII; the artist-engraver Gustave Doré; and at least one woman, the trouser-wearing sculptor Louise Abbéma. Gottlieb refers to Abbéma, somewhat ungallantly, as ...”

“... electricity generation from nuclear fusion is a very long way off. Researchers at Lockheed Martin are working on a nippier approach that could, they say, ‘be ready with a power plant in ten years’ that ‘would enable us to meet global electricity demands by around 2050, in time to have a significant impact on our climate.’ But no one else seems ...”

“... through the waxworks of English history. Ackroyd’s early mentor J.H. Prynne, in a lecture on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, speaks of ‘that extraordinary poem where Blake decides to rework Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton.’ ‘There are,’ he continues, ‘congestions of personality which result from that ...”

“... I start crying at the informational video, which juxtaposes stiff ambassadorial footage of King Charles talking about his nonna with a female voice intoning: ‘She stood in tears amid the alien corn.’ I’M in the alien corn! The effect of poetry is reliable, still. Your skin gets a whole size smaller.Upstairs, I walk past the life-mask, with its visible ...”