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“... technological development essential to the rise of tennis was the discovery of vulcanisation by Charles Goodyear in 1844, which allowed for the production of bouncier balls than the hair-filled ones used in real tennis. ‘When a cut lawn and a soft rubber ball were eventually put together,’ Berry writes, ‘lawn tennis became inevitable and, because it ...”

“... two weeks before his death (1955). 'Portrait of Charlie Parker' by Beauford Delaney (1968). 'Charles the First' by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1982). Charlie Parker at a photomat, Kansas City (1940).PreviousNext William Burroughs said that you should never trust anyone who looked the same from photo to photo; Parker can appear a wholly different person across ...”

“... living novelist versus Britain’s greatest ever novelist as if it were a literary Godzilla meets King Kong. Ackroyd understands Dickens better than pettifogging academics because Ackroyd, like his subject, is a creative genius, and such minds are privileged to think alike. Ackroyd himself makes this claim, if rather more tactfully than his ...”

“... and the ethnographic records in Western Europe. For instance, it has been established by Charles Phythian-Adams, in his splendid study of 15th and early 16th-century Coventry, Desolation of a City, that a division between home and workplace was so common in that city at that time that the absentee father can no longer be considered a product of ...”

“... Jesuit Desideri, who wrote about Lhasa in the early 18th century, and, in the 20th century, Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson, British scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War ...”

“... a Free Commonwealth, at a time when preparations were already under way to welcome the returning Charles II. There are two elements, Milton asserts, in ‘the whole freedom of man’, one of which he describes as civil and the other as spiritual liberty. To enjoy these twin aspects of our freedom, we must be able to choose and act as we wish; we must never ...”

“... target was Burke as the author of Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770), an attack on the King, or at any rate on the Palace, as seeking to influence, to frustrate and to corrupt Parliament through a cabal of secret and confidential advisers. This was an old charge with a complicated history: it owed something to Bolingbroke, whom Burke very ...”

“... treatment’. David himself was elected to the Convention in 1792 and voted for the death of the king. He took a leading part in the destruction of the Academy and was put on the Committee of General Security, the police committee which, even more than the Committee of Public Safety, was primarily responsible for the administration of the Terror. When the ...”

“... of Tartt’s: Bunny was Edmund Wilson’s nickname); Francis Abernathy is the wimp; and the twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, are the beauties. The members of the gang have no life outside their poses. There is nothing here unmotivated, no detail that is not telling (‘he carried an umbrella, a bizarre sight in Hampden’), no revelation that is not a ...”

“... Peel, alongside British trade goods). Not for nothing did the Bishop of Oxford crown him the ‘King of Siluria’. But Murchison’s geological expansionism became more threatening. His Silurian began devouring Sedgwick’s Cambrian below, leading to a period of bitter recrimination. Sedgwick was constantly forced to fight a rearguard action, attempting to ...”

“... with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson who engaged most directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read as a massive attempt to heal what Olson saw as the fatal ...”

“... William Rees-Mogg – do not wish to argue that the Americans or, say, the Swiss ought to have a king. And many would probably be embarrassed to have the Windsors bracketed with the House of Saud or the Sultan of Brunei – although these are the only two monarchies to compare with them in wealth: the Japanese royal family, though presiding over a far richer ...”

“... the best scientific minds of her generation, Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday, William Whewell and Charles Babbage among them. The passion for numbers and experiments was inherited from Annabella, who was christened by Byron on one of their happier days ‘Princess of Parallelograms’, but in Ada it was shot through with her father’s imaginative ...”

“... on a single day at Verden on the River Aller in northern Saxony, on the orders of Charlemagne, King of the Franks.’ So, bluntly, reported the author of the Royal Frankish Annals, the main Frankish narrative for the period, which were written up in 790 or so. By the time those annals had been put into print at Cologne in 1521, Charlemagne had come to be ...”

“... the Provençal poet, is pretty dull. The book which best deserves reprinting is The Strang Life of Charles Waterton (1782-1865), a biography of the recklessly eccentric naturalist and taxidermist, published in 1949. Here was a rumbustious, unaffected figure whom Aldington could admire without reservation. Squire Waterton had a perfect contempt for social ...”