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“... At the military academy in Saint-Cyr, which he entered in 1908, Charles de Gaulle was known as ‘the great asparagus’. But aside from the fact that he stood six feet four in his socks it was his character that drew attention: he was rebellious yet aloof, sceptical yet sure of himself. Not everyone admired his manner and his height could be a nuisance ...”

“... who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as ...”

“... doctrinaire Marxism is the last obstacle on Germany’s road to democracy. An American scholar, Charles Maier of Harvard, has followed the historians’ dispute and written a commentary on it. The nonce word in his title raises expectations of originality which the book doesn’t fulfil. His summaries of the main contributions are useful, fair, and almost ...”

“... as in ‘Mrs Bathurst’, one of his most powerful stories – the muddle, stress, strain, hope, joy and confusion of a worldwide ‘United Services’ society seem to find their appropriately multiple tongues. No single narrator sounds quite right in his stories, but the combined hubbub of voices – voices that were once mute – forms a new and ...”

“... has seen a bill before it goes before Parliament. It was reported in October last year that King Charles had been allowed to vet emergency legislation to freeze rents in Scotland as a result of the cost of living crisis. Why? It might affect tenancies at Balmoral.The ownership and organisation of the Balmoral estate is not the cause of rural Scotland’s ...”

“... starts by announcing his subject’s date of birth; unlike most biographers, he gets it wrong. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight was born on 9 July 1900, not 4 September, under the sign of Cancer, not Virgo, however tempting it may be, for reasons which become clear in the course of the story, to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is ...”

“... listed by Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia of 1593: Docility, Chastity, Benevolence, Hope, Magnanimity, Health, Spendour, Clemency, Moderation, Fidelity, Assiduity, Tranquillity, Inclination, Divine Grace, Contrition, Severity, Scandal, Amorous Contentment, Simulation, Generosity, Pertinacity, Bliss. That the appearance of a figure ever conveyed ...”

“... Forster’s ‘repudiation of our white bunk is genuine, sincere, and pretty thorough ... King Charles must have his head off. Homage to the headsman.’ It’s too often the case that the dark burnings of the most impassioned artist are rewarded primarily by the pale fire of scholarship, and Lawrence’s weighty, three-volume treatment by the Cambridge ...”

“... The person who most encouraged him to ‘meditate upon himself’ was the straight poet Charles Olson. Wieners first encountered Olson at a reading on the night of Hurricane Hazel in 1954. Olson offered him a loan for tuition, room and board at Black Mountain College, and Wieners studied there in 1955 and 1956. After this, he recommended Olson’s ...”

“... there were other ideas outside the West and its academies. Yet Coleman was enough of a utopian to hope that the diversity of the world’s musics would eventually achieve a higher unity: a day of non-judgment, when ‘the categories of sound will not involve any race but just the sound itself.’ That he spoke of ‘sound’, rather than ‘music’ or ...”

“... power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that the archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After ...”

“... to rebut the Anglican smear that they were king killers, that Presbyterian disloyalty had brought Charles I to the block. On the other, Presbyterians – being solidly Whig – dissociated themselves from the divine right principles of non-resistance and passive obedience inculcated by High Church Anglican Tories. Some Presbyterians, including Castlereagh’s ...”

“... the mid-18th century; but despite a lineage that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly ...”

“... underway, using the same detective I used in this book, but not using him so violently. I hope to finish that this month. The first serial rights have been sold to the Black Mask.’ Hammett wasn’t quite coming clean: The Dain Curse isn’t a book-length detective story, but three pulp stories loosely tied together, with the same ...”

“... become a patron of Oriental learning, overseeing important translations of works on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to ...”