“... Ellen (note her initials), was serially unfaithful: in other words, he’s a sprightly updating of Charles Bovary, however much he would resist the comparison. In his defence, Braithwaite might point out that ‘Charles n’était pas de ceux qui descendent au fond des choses,’ while he is determined to get to the bottom ...”

“... vast work of American history: Perry Miller’s two-volume study The New England Mind. Miller’s hope for that book was similar to O’Brien’s: he sought to recover the Puritans from the dismissive views of his contemporaries, who had been inclined to see dourness and even anti-intellectualism where Miller saw reason and order. Miller’s task was made ...”

“... not only to wrest control of the sickroom from Lord Lovelace and to banish unorthodox friends like Charles Babbage, but to extort the dying woman’s confession of adultery with a neighbour, thereby permanently alienating the married couple. Though Lovelace began an idealised account of the courage with which his wife confronted her suffering, the revelation ...”

“... basic scenario’? Many onlookers have asked the question, most notable among them the sociologist Charles Tilly who, in The Contentious French (1986), engaged with a much broader swathe of French violence, from food riots to civil wars, and offered a nuanced sociological explanation. Burton, by focusing more narrowly on ‘expiatory’ violence, with its ...”

“... In 1853 the Reverend Frederick Morris, an opponent of Charles Darwin’s and a man with a Victorian sense of propriety, urged his parishioners to emulate the fidelity of a small bird called the dunnock. Be thou like the dunnock, he told them – the female and the male impeccably faithful to each other. What would the Rev ...”

“... most celebrated cases having been solved incorrectly. The hero of The Manual of Detection is Charles Unwin, a clerk at a detective agency, known only as ‘the Agency’, which occupies all 46 floors of the tallest building in an unnamed city that in some ways is quite like New York, only smaller (the Empire State Building has 102 storeys), and in other ...”

“... not only of the famous. She brings alive for the reader a host of lesser characters: the cuckolded Charles Bagot, ‘pink, erect in native dignity, and, I hope, not valuing her’ – his wife – ‘a pinch of snuff’; old Lady Carlisle in a portrait ‘attitudinising with vases’; the hunting-mad Duke of Beaufort and the ...”

“... fool enough to go to a desert island it is undoubtedly the work I should take with me. As it is, I hope to read the Diary all through once again before I die. Pepys’s Diary has a special character. Pepys was a competent civil servant who devoted his life to the service of the Admiralty Board. He wrote his Diary in his spare time. He showed it to no ...”

“... seems is less interesting intellectually than a novel with which it shares a liquid affinity – Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies. Kingsley’s Christian Socialism linked potable water and spiritual purity in a sentimental fusion not dissimilar from Cheever’s. But whereas Kingsley was motivated by an indignation which even to this day has a power to carry ...”

“... from official in character. Roskill fought the censors of the Cabinet Office as resolutely as Sir Charles Webster did when writing his History of the Strategic Air Offensive. Roskill went on to write more personal books: three volumes on Hankey and as a final production a hilarious life of Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty. He also launched a sharp attack on ...”

“... case, it is quite clear that many human capacities for communication have a hereditary basis, as Charles Darwin showed long ago – for instance, the smile of an infant and his yell of displeasure. Indeed, all powers of learning and teaching must depend upon particular activities of the brain. Each animal species is programmed to learn in its own special way ...”

“... to literary agents than that they are merely low and intrusive. In his Irving to Irving (1974), Charles Madison credits them with a major part of the responsibility for the present fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to ...”

“... had been born in the same year as him, and Henry VIII (crowned in 1509) was three years older. Charles V was installed as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 at the age of nineteen. Still, Suleyman had large shoes to fill. His father, Selim, had doubled the size of the empire during his eight years in power, and commentators in Western Europe at first viewed ...”

“... sometimes with her mother or her sister, lived at a bewildering variety of addresses, consoled by hope. Humbert’s first book of poems, London Sonnets, was published in 1920, but he didn’t really make a stir until Requiem (1927), although Bagguley is surely wrong in saying that ‘no book of verse since Masefield’s Everlasting Mercy sold so ...”

“... extra-Roth material that Bloom has to hand. Here, after all, is a woman who starred opposite Charles Chaplin at the age of 19 and who has acted with almost all the great actors of the mid-20th-century English theatre. Having enjoyed romantic trysts with Yul Brynner at Cecil B. De Mille’s country retreat, committed adultery with Lawrence ...”