“... who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment held out as little hope of salvation as saying one’s prayers at home and never going to church. The ritual and the socialising, along with the change of climate and scenery, were part of the cure, if not all of it, as even the doctors sometimes admitted.For about twenty years ...”

“... dust-jacket to Forty Stories mentions Pynchon and Beckett, but this is the world of Thurber and Charles Addams. Barthelme’s more serious intentions were made clear from the start. In ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight’ (a story not to be found here but in his first book Come back, Dr Caligari) three protestors picket a New York church, in order to ...”

“... VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to England, executed (by strangling before his body was burned) in October 1536. Daniell, like his hero, is an ...”

“... the actor who played Pete Dean in EastEnders was living with a woman who had once dated Prince Charles. The most interesting aspect of Tunstall’s survey, indeed, is the attention he draws to the relationship with television as the biggest single shift in newspaper culture since he conducted a similar study in 1968, just before Rupert Murdoch’s arrival ...”

“... under the US system. I only think he is too confident of having demonstrated this. In reply to Charles Beitz’s criticism of the purely procedural interpretation of equal respect as implausibly narrow, he says: It is because we disagree about what counts as a substantively respectful outcome that we need a decision-procedure; in this context, folding ...”

“... on HMS Namur, a 74-gun man-of-war. The vessel’s captain was Jane Austen’s younger brother, Charles (there are no references to Douglas in the Austen family correspondence). He entered the Royal Navy not as a cabin-boy but as officer material, and was (probably) instructed in reading, writing and seamanship by the ship’s schoolteachers. He ...”

“... of that stance it is hard to see them behaving differently. In the end, the best they can hope for is incompetence. Governments eventually accumulate errors, and this government is no exception. Sooner or later the electorate will weary of it, largely on non-ideological grounds. But it might well be later rather than sooner. The second problem facing ...”

“... As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel Post Office (1971) gives some idea of how this might have come about: ‘It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus ...”

“... passions inflamed: Laplace was French and Adams English. Parity was restored when the Frenchman Charles Delaunay showed that Laplace’s calculation did indeed account for half the effect and that tidal friction could account for the rest. The Moon raises tides on the oceans directly below it. As the Earth rotates, it drags these tidal bulges with it, so ...”

“... methodology. This was among the criticisms made of The Bell Curve (1994), Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s analysis of the correlations between IQ test data and race, unemployment, poor parenting and crime in the US. More recently, the historian of science Jessica Riskin and biologist Marcus Feldman excoriated Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic ...”

“... of English Poets”!’ he wrote to Emily Hale in February 1933, halfway through his year as Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard. The lecture included the following considerations (transcribed by his brother Henry):The desire to write a letter, to put down what you don’t want anybody else to see but the person you are writing to, but which yet ...”

“... working mothers, female professionals, ‘family values’. The respectful attention given to Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve shows that they are anything but discredited among the so-called cultural élite. A spirited storyteller, May has uncovered a wealth of unfamiliar lore. We learn of black women slaves who refused to be ‘bred’ by their ...”

“... all, there is the sympathetic identification, what Hugh Kenner, speaking of Joyce, calls the Uncle Charles Principle: Naipaul’s description so assumes Biswas’s way of thinking that it comically, pedantically offers the precise brand-name of the stomach powder, just as Biswas would if he were narrating the story. Here Naipaul has become Biswas, as we ...”

“... thought, read, and observed here, about it. I am very well and only wish I was not so lazy, but hope and believe one is less so from 40 to 50, if one lives, than at any other time of life. Matthew Arnold was 37 when he wrote this letter from Strasbourg where in 1859 he was on a fact-finding mission about foreign schools for the royal commission on ...”

“... liaison in a sort of perverse fashion,’ he claims. One letter he writes in the persona of ‘Charles Bovary’. ‘What does your name stand for, Dick?’ he writes in another, with the sign-off, ‘Here is mine.’ The letters might make an interesting art piece, he proposes – ‘a Calle Art piece. You know, like Sophie Calle?’ They could paste the ...”