“... more affluent West End. The ornate Fairfield offices designed by Honeyman and Keppie (the young Charles Rennie Mackintosh worked there at the time) now house a shipbuilding museum, but construction continues next door at BAE Systems, where Type 26 frigates are being built for the Royal Navy. The yard has become a rallying point for protesters who claim BAE ...”

“... The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall ...”

“... is it something that we would wish to re-read?’ I squirmed. My rebuttal was resentful. But I hope I learned that in the matter of form and inspiration, the skilful engineering of form was by no means enough. In order to introduce Timothy Steele – the other poet whose company has deeply influenced me – I’d like to quote a brief poem from his first ...”

“... Waugh suspected that Greene had taken the idea of Scobie’s warped sanctification from the poet Charles Péguy, whose saying supplied the book’s epigraph: ‘No one is as knowledgeable in the matter of Christianity as the sinner, that is, except the saint.’ Péguy had made this ‘preposterous deduction’ as a morally erratic convert who needed to put ...”

“... the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the CBS. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it.’ In the days that followed, he was suitably penitent, but only the degree of the uproar had surprised him. The War of the Worlds was a Halloween prank and meant to cause a stir. He would have been tied up in the courts ...”

“... since you translated this’, and Johnson replied, ‘with a sort of triumphant smile, “Sir, I hope it is.”’ It seems likely that his hardening of Lobo’s comment about the Moors had in fact a stylistic rather than a substantive character, in the sense of being a simplification which brought an essential attitude into stronger relief than in the ...”

“... in coalition with their unspeakable parents, against the unlucky fall-guy or -girl of the house: Charles (or Clarissa) Doublebind. It comes as no surprise to note that Charles/Clarissa, a naive and dithering but basically rather sweet personality, has been driven into a spiralling psychosis through this unholy conspiracy ...”

“... he is guilty of a crime known to the law. Captured guerrillas may have little ultimately to hope for, but they are entitled not to be summarily executed or tortured or held indefinitely without trial. The Bush administration after 9/11 set out to change all that. With the designation of unlawful combatant it created a self-sustaining doctrine that there ...”

“... by the French king in the 1420 Treaty of Troyes, Henry joined forces with his new allies, Charles VI of France and Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, to send envoys to the crusader king of Poland, the Byzantine emperor and the Ottoman sultan. The exact purpose of the mission is unclear: the emperor was told of the kings’ ...”

“... On an atoll​ in the Indian Ocean, on an April day in 1836 when the water was unusually smooth, Charles Darwin wandered out over a coral reef. He gazed through the water into the ‘gullies and hollows’ below. He admired the scene, though not excessively. The naturalists he had read had described ‘submarine grottos decked with a thousand beauties ...”

“... incidental detail; the story itself is simple enough. It tells how Freddie Montgomery (Frederick Charles St John Vanderveld Montgomery, if you please), stout, blond, of some intellect and no substance, king of the expatriate castle on a Mediterranean island, carelessly finds himself owing money to one Señor Aguirre, a local ‘businessman’ given to ...”

“... saying: Good evening, I would just like to say first that, as an interviewer, and as what I hope you will believe to be an unbiased member of the electorate, I’m grateful to Anthony Eden for inviting me to cross-question him on political issues. I would like, too, to feel that I am asking questions which you yourselves would like to ask in my ...”

“... We should hear more from some of these women. Now they have been freshly discovered, we may hope to have a printed collection of letters and journals – especially the letters of Elizabeth Amherst, the diary of Sarah Cowper, the Papillon papers and the letters of Marthae Taylor. Elizabeth Bergen Brophy presents us with much material, the object of ...”

“... was Wordsworthian, this diction was evangelical.’ Where Davie tends to be good on Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley makes him nervous, for Wesley ‘is a poet of vehement feeling’. Too much feeling in hymn-poetry Davie is certainly not prepared to countenance. Poetry that expresses giving way to feeling seems to Davie un-British and unmanly. It is in some ...”

“... to both works illustrates an editorial will-to-power occasionally recalling that of Nabokov’s Charles Kinbote. Privileged and put-down, Craft has had an unlucky cultural role. Famous, esteemed for a diversity of talents, he has necessarily provoked resentment for his domination of a public genius; and there is evidence to assume that he resents it ...”