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“... head a Beethoven sonata and cadenza.In autumn 1850 Darwin’s ten-year-old daughter Annie was ill. Charles and Emma took her to Ramsgate.Every day behind a stripy awning,    Blue Woman lowers Annie into sea.But Annie catches cold. Then influenza.    He takes her, with sister Etty for company,to Malvern. Emma, seven months pregnant, stays ...”

“... as far as Thackeray: gentility’s struggle to preserve itself against invading shabbiness. The St Charles family is first discovered living a pre-war, prosperous ‘leisured life’. 1914 brings catastrophe and gradual decline. The heroine’s dashing father loses a leg in the Great War and survives a whisky-sodden philanderer. The family’s only son is ...”

“... the room. The bare facts are enough to convey the shock of being there, of having this glimpse, as Charles van Onselen puts it, into ‘the Angel of Death’s laboratory’. Van Onselen’s long, disturbing and magnificently dogged book, The Fox and the Flies, takes us through a grim terrain spread across three continents, a world of squalor and violence, of ...”

“... waiting to see what the US election will bring. For their part, the Americans are hoping against hope that the present lull in violence is the sign of an emerging order rather than one of the many illusory ‘tipping points’ that they have imagined during the last five years. Meanwhile, Nouri al-Maliki’s government is trying to persuade itself and the ...”

“... all plan to pass through them on their way to territory evacuated by a collapsing Iraqi Army. Some hope to witness the fall, or liberation, of Kirkuk. Others will go to Mosul, another oil centre that the Americans and the Turks do not want to fall into Kurdish hands. The Kurds are less likely to bother with Mosul, which even they admit does not have a Kurdish ...”

“... Dans le Métro Miracle sans nom à la station Javel …          ‘Y a de la joie’, Charles Trenet We got in on the bottom line at Duck Alley. Ten feet of onions to hoe and a disruptive sneeze blew in from the Sissy Isles. What I hope to say … What I hope to say is, out ...”

“... It does also happen to be winter, a beautiful but drought-stricken winter. There seems little hope that the murk surrounding the Boipatong tragedy will lift. The Police have appealed in vain for witnesses to come forward with evidence. A body calling itself the Independent Investigation Board claims to have already gathered over thirty statements from ...”

“... Edmund Ludlow were first published posthumously in 1698-99, and edited in two volumes in 1894 by Charles Firth, later the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. For centuries, the Memoirs were one of the best-known sources on the civil wars. Then, in 1970, a manuscript of Ludlow’s titled ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ was auctioned at ...”

“... of kitsch – late in life, he called it ‘an ongoing emergency’ – committed him to the hope that its audience could be rescued. But it also required him to believe that the fans of kitsch wanted and needed saving. As his audience expanded, Greenberg’s taste narrowed, its tight focus reflected in his personal collection. Presumably he liked much ...”

“... deep, and applied the carbolic soap to those parts of our lives that even Mrs Thatcher couldn’t hope to reach. We’re back on the straight and narrow now. We’re taking it decaff in case it keeps us awake. We can’t cure the virus, but in the current sexual climate there’s just a chance it’ll die of boredom. It is one thing to sense that the Aids ...”

“... John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next day at a Women’s Institute meeting in West Newton village hall, however, the queen herself ...”

“... who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia (see his anthology of Serbian poetry, The Horse Has Six Legs, and his numerous single volumes of Lalic, Tadic, Ristovic, Salamun and many more). I wish her patience, talented originals, and many ...”

“... not coincidental that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For while, in some ways, the British monarchy is constantly developing and evolving, in other respects it is remarkably consistent and unchanging, and one of its most unvarying features during the last three hundred years has been ...”

“... it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor suggests: it is a culture of authenticity. Taylor says that we ought neither to boost this culture (in the manner of the truly dreadful books produced by representatives of ‘the human potential movement’) nor knock it (in the manner of Lasch ...”

“... It was​ in Charles Dickens’s upstairs sitting room that I met the future king of England. The Duchess of Cornwall was wearing a red paisley silk coat and dress by Anna Valentine. I know that because I was peeping out of the window and heard a lady from the Daily Mail say so into her mobile phone while she stalked the pavement outside ...”