“... fell, as we are told, for the ‘left-leaning rhetoric’ of the Modern Movement. The second is a passage from Brideshead Revisited which Rybczynski is content to dangle, as if it were an emblematic truth needing no further comment, at the head of his chapter on ‘Austerity’. The nostalgic Charles Ryder is remembering ...”

“... and no illustrations offered other than that ‘booby-trapped parcels’ were sent to Prince Charles. (How many? All at once? What kind of booby trap? Was Prince Charles hurt? Was anyone hurt?) Wilkinson also recounts that an Animal Liberation Front member is ‘reported’ to have sent a leaflet to supporters calling ...”

“... the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was ...”

“... dome is an armature of artistically worked steel some fifteen thousand feet in diameter. This passage is from ‘Cities [I]’, one of the so-called ‘urban’ Illuminations that conceive of the metropolis in ways that were proper to London in the 1870s, a teeming, futuristic heart of empire, all grandeur and abjection, progress and poverty, and quite ...”

“... later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been sharing with Keats since Tom’s death nearly two years before. No one would come with Keats to the warm climate his doctors prescribed. Keats’s friends had ...”

“... decades’ worth of precious tat at the old place last month was hugely stressful, a Major Life Passage and all that. One’s pale, vine-withered, all-too-sensitive skin took notice. Nor did Blakey help matters when she said: Well, that’s how it started with my father. (We’re still legally married, btw; the ban on same-sex marriage voted in in the ...”

“... a get well soon letter from Blair, when he (Richards) fell out of his tree. Is it possible the passage has been taken out on its way from publication in the US? Strange because not much else has, certainly not the American spelling, or the careful explanation of anything even faintly British, along with dogged translations of rhyming slang no one has ...”

“... The votive spectre, sentimentalised, inflated, patched into every available blank space, was Charles Spencer Chaplin: ‘London’s world famous star’. Child vagrant. Global-franchise tramp. Swiss domiciled millionaire guardian of his own archive. Author of a myth-making autobiography exploiting the nexus of these streets. The fable of Chaplin’s ...”

“... On 18 June​ 1940 Charles de Gaulle, speaking from London, where he had arrived the previous day, denounced the new government led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, which had called for an armistice after the comprehensive defeat of France’s armed forces at the hands of the Wehrmacht. ‘Nothing is lost for France,’ he declared ...”

“... Evidence Act (1984), which laid down strict rules for the treatment of suspects. Before its passage, confessions could be extracted by any means necessary, so long as any injuries inflicted weren’t too obvious. There were no tape or video recordings, no lawyer present, just police officers. The suspects who confessed claimed they did so after being ...”

“... on which the gimmick announces itself as a thing. Ngai devotes a couple of incisive paragraphs to Charles Wright’s Harlem novel The Wig: A Mirror Image (1966), a delirious tall tale – ‘folkloric’, Wright called it – spun out of the protagonist’s fashioning of a new hairstyle which, he hopes, will render him racially ambiguous, and thus more ...”

“... they aren’t nearly so mysterious as one would think.’ Malinowski’s mentor at the LSE was Charles Gabriel Seligman, who studied the dreams of indigenous people in different parts of the empire, and gave Malinowski a copy of W.H.R. Rivers’s 1918 article ‘Dreams and Primitive Culture’ (‘for every feature and process of the dream I have found an ...”

“... the unsophisticated sentiments of the most natural and original of the species?’ This remarkable passage is not cited by Honour but it becomes especially interesting in view of the fact that Knight’s readers would have had the chance to see the public exhibition in London and Paris of an African woman, Saartjie Baartman, as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, the ...”

“... took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated Baxter’s useful skill with ...”

“... one of the few painters to make a success of fresco in his murals for the Robing Room, warned Charles Cope, who was just starting work on the House of Lords, that ‘when you are about to paint a sky 17 feet long by some four or five broad, I don’t advise you to have a Prince looking in upon you every ten minutes or so – or when you are going to trace ...”