“... honesty with which he recounts his experiences that he is able to admit as much. In Borderlines Charles Nicholl heads east. In his previous travel book, The Fruit Palace, he explored the ruthless cocaine underworld of Colombia: this time he is hoping to find the sources of spiritual rather than narcotic bliss by enrolling in a Buddhist forest temple in ...”

“... ambassador, is to be believed, in the autumn of 1533 he twice went so far as to urge the Emperor Charles V to act against Henry, though whether he was calling for an armed invasion or just a trade embargo is not clear. But he never made a firm public statement against the break with Rome. He did not speak out, so far as we know, in early 1532, when royal ...”

“... at Surinam, the setting for Oroonoko, where she may have gathered political intelligence for Charles II’s government. During 1666 she certainly undertook such a mission to Antwerp, where she contacted a Cromwellian exile called William Scot, offering him a pardon in exchange for information on alleged Dutch plans to invade England with the help of ...”

“... water-proof: so I have to walk about in it, having nothing else.’ Then, on 27 November 1912, to Charles Gifford: ‘You will be grieved and shocked to hear Emma died this morning shortly after nine o’clock.’ There follow, besides the usual replies to condolences, a glimpse or two of the squalor of domestic unhappiness: ‘I am getting through E.’s ...”

“... and time-servers. Hawke offered a new dawn to Labor voters, and seemed to offer a gleam of hope even in company boardrooms, who thought that at least he might be able to keep the more rumbustious unions in check, and soothe a troubled country. And indeed Hawke’s election automatically healed one festering wound. It has long been one of the puzzles of ...”

“... Altogether, the first third of this book does not make cheerful reading. Only after Beatrice met Charles Booth, who was already engaged on his epoch-making survey of Life and Labour in London, did things begin to look up. Both Charles and his wife Mary became firm friends with this beautiful and intellectually precocious ...”

“... is a chronological table to assist their memories. Speaking of Joan’s strange encounter with Charles VII at Chinon, where today the docile tourist follows his guide from mouldering tower to tower, she finds an ‘irrational element’ in history which ‘will always defy analysis’, an idea that would have been worth saying more about. Miss Warner is ...”

“... who called her “a piquant mixture between a milkmaid and a lady” – to the elegant Sir Charles Bunbury, formerly the husband of the Lady Sarah Lennox with whom George III had been so much in love before duty forced him to marry his German queen.’ There’s also a Victorianism of outlook, in assertions such as one to the effect that Mrs ...”

“... have free men, equal in rights.’ In a letter to a friend, the stonemason and ‘worker-poet’ Charles Poncy, she described her feelings: ‘I spent nights without sleeping, days without sitting down. You are crazy, you are drunk, you are happy to fall asleep in the mire and to wake up in heaven … The Republic has been won. It is assured.’ But the ...”

“... describe the ‘thousand gestures and motions’ he made, in his moment of crisis, without any hope of a response. Whatever form they took, the gestures and motions were, he thinks, an expression of despair, on his own behalf, and of sorrow on behalf of his dead comrades: ‘For, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them, except three ...”

“... permitted dope He medicines the sickness of our age; Offers the ugly, glamour; the hopeless, hope. Compare these pieces to Larkin’s advertising poems, such as ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ or ‘Send No Money’; or ‘Essential Beauty’, with its ambivalent response to the vast billboards that ‘Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise/Of ...”

“... annoyed with us, or worried in any way … it is very kind of you to ask us to luncheon … I do hope your cough is better.’ To her husband she wrote: ‘Keep calm and don’t be bullied.’ In an age and a class where letter-writing was obligatory she was a versatile and ingenious correspondent, learning to put a dab of jam on the most bread and butter ...”

“... allies, the hardliners who had forcibly purged and dissolved the Long Parliament and brought Charles I to justice. Radical Puritans through the land, who had been troubled by Cromwell’s political ecumenicalism, rejoiced in his new readiness to prolong the war of light and darkness, to round on the ‘malignant’ and ‘delinquent’ Royalists (whose ...”

“... others, had earned the admiration of the Anglo-American upper classes was the great Lone Eagle, Charles Lindbergh. Most US politicians were eager to be associated with him and flocked to his side, but FDR couldn’t forgive the fact that Lindbergh was so seemingly unbothered by Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia and its treatment of the Jews that he ...”

“... He seemed always to be in the right place at the right time: he was there for the execution of Charles I, and on the ship that brought Charles II back from exile. He watched London burn in September 1666 from the window of his house, and felt ‘a shower of Firedrops’ on his face. He experienced the terror of the Dutch ...”