“... 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 ...”

“... that’s not the whole story, or indeed the most interesting part of it. In Chapter 13 comes the passage I have already mentioned, in which Connie, having dined with her husband and roundly condemned him in her own mind as a dead fish of a gentleman with a celluloid soul, puts on ‘rubber tennis-shoes, and then a light coat’, and slips out of the house to ...”

“... his writings he could be eloquent about man’s desolation in an indifferent universe. The famous passage in his Foundations of Belief still makes you shiver: Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a ...”

“... for the book Fante was then working on, The Brotherhood of the Grape (1977). In 1978, the poet Charles Bukowski mentioned his debt to Fante in his novel Women; Bukowski’s publisher, John Martin of the Black Sparrow Press, set about reprinting Fante’s books. Bukowski, who had been devoted to both books ‘like a man who had found gold in the city ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... being served. The Quarto text sounds like Stephen Rea, the modernised one like Gielgud or Prince Charles. The same or very similar modernised texts in Katherine Duncan-Jones’s scholarly and accessible new edition seem perfectly presentable on their own, but in Vendler are often destabilised by their immediate adjacency to the Quarto texts. Duncan-Jones ...”

“... of myth by forgotten streams … Had he not moved unseen when darkness covered the waters?’ The passage is wonderfully facetious, but at the same time it manages momentarily to smuggle into this remorseless world, by the duplicity of a joke, just the sort of transcendent feelings evoked by Rossetti’s pictures.Reviewers were not slow to allocate Waugh’s ...”

“... Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Their music embodied the promise of another country, one that was true to its professed ideals. Its very existence seemed miraculous. A vernacular music, created by the descendants of slaves, had ...”

“... This makes it a maddening book to read, and only someone who knows the biographies of Welles by Charles Higham, Simon Callow and others is likely to guess what Conrad is up to and why. Yet he is also writing criticism. Here the difference should matter between a line written as a writer writes and a line spoken as an actor reads. Even in a study like this ...”

“... heard in the word ‘Norton’ an echo of that job, and even of his family – he was appointed as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. From childhood onwards, Eliot was fascinated not just by names in general, but by his own. Murder in the Cathedral, the 1935 play which, throughout the period covered by this volume of letters, yields a healthy income ...”

“... year Swift published an extract from McGahern’s unpublished first novel. It was spotted by Charles Monteith at Faber, who went on to oversee the publication of many of McGahern’s books. When Swift read the first part of another novel – to be called The Barracks – he wrote: ‘It’s a real advance. Very exciting. I still think the first book ...”

“... reality, brought to the heart of European cities or visited on Korea, Cambodia or Vietnam. In 1869 Charles Dilke wrote that ‘the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind,’ and with ghoulish eugenist fervour praised Anglo-Saxons as ‘the only extirpating race on earth’. Bombing was first thought of ...”

“... Charles Taylor​ has had a long, fêted career as a philosopher with a particular interest in bringing the French and German traditions into productive conversation with their Anglo-American counterparts, and in bringing political and ethical theorising to bear on contemporary politics both in the UK and in his country of birth, Canada: he was an active participant in the British New Left, and stood more than once as a New Democratic Party candidate for the Canadian parliament ...”