“... they possibly have in common, these wildly different figures, the nature boy and the urban genie?Charles Arthur Russell Jr was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in May 1951, and died in New York in April 1992 from complications related to Aids. His father, Chuck, a former naval officer, was the town mayor. It’s easy to picture something down-home and folksy, but the ...”

“... This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man who shot him’; Baudelaire’s ‘king of the blue’ brought ‘stumbling and ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are ...”

“... In this he differs from other thriller writers who have found in Florida the new face of crime. Charles Willeford, whose Detective Sergeant Hoke Moseley ‘looked a little better, he thought, with the blue-grey teeth and always put his dentures in before shaving’, never gets half so close to creating dreamboats. Hiaasen’s use of fancy ...”

“... etymology.Heads fascinated Gauguin. The show includes a fantasia centred on a decapitated Tahitian king, and Gauguin Heads might have provided a more coherent title and remit than Gauguin Portraits. A portrait is, after all, attached to a definite identity. It’s true that you come across odd items at the National Gallery that fit this description: a ...”

“... father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms. (King Lear, IV.vii) It is often said that Susanna was Shakespeare’s favourite daughter, and that Judith – who signed her name with an awkward little mark like two pigtails, who was still a spinster at the age of 30 – was always second best. This is ...”

“... Bernini felt to be beneath him. To bother with them personally, he explained, would be like the King of France giving an audience to a poor widow over a matter of a few pence. He did claim, on the other hand, of his bust of Charles I, that he had taken ‘as much care for the packing as studye in making of itt’. He was ...”

“... late 1950s to the famous torture trial of 1967. These operations were restored to topicality after Charles Richardson’s escape from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The ...”

“... Revolution broke out, Priestley’s Birmingham laboratory was torn down by patriotic Church and King mobs and eventually he fled to exile in America. Davy’s previous employer, the chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes, had also been confined to the margins of his profession because of his support for the French Revolution. Davy’s address to the Royal ...”

“... is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn of the century, divided the ‘schizosaur’ into type A, the bipedal carnivore or saurischian (‘lizard ...”

“... he considered priest-ridden and decadent, and for its spectacularly dysfunctional ruling family (King Carlos IV was mentally unstable; real power lay with the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his ...”

“... of America and its role in the world. Currently led, if that is the word, by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming ...”

“... indelible in our collective consciousness. Further testimony of that indelibility is provided by Charles Causley’s new collection, Secret Destinations. Causley was born in Launceston, Cornwall, in 1917. His place and date of birth still weigh heavily on his work. He is at his best when writing of the locality he knows best; the poems in the first half of ...”

“... affected by it are likely to have been precisely those whose fathers were closest to the exiled Charles II, and who were therefore most likely to be catapulted to social prominence after 1660. Moreover, no amount of explaining Rochester’s personal circumstances will explain why he appears to have spoken to the condition of many of his contemporaries. It ...”

“... as early as 1607, and sporadic digging had taken place from 1689. But it was not till 1734, when Charles III of Naples became interested in the sites, that anything like serious investigation was begun, under the direction of an engineer from Spain, Rocco Gioacchino de Alcubierre. Alcubierre was interested only in treasure-hunting; eager only to find statues ...”

“... of Viollet-le-Duc’s favourites), whose tongue protrudes in concentration as he buggers a king with a stick? The first readers of Hugo’s novel who gazed up at the scene of Quasimodo’s acrobatics must have been disappointed. In 1831, Notre-Dame was a blackened husk, softened by centuries of rain into a hideous, warty mass. An early daguerreotype of ...”