“... flow with a fund of amusing anecdotes which improved with telling. Though as the nephew of Charles James Fox he felt himself the embodiment of what was best in the Whig tradition, he had very little of the Whig consciousness of caste. When his friend Granville asked to be made an earl, he commented: ‘Why one of the ...”

“... been done in 1688 and 1714 was compatible with hereditary succession, and distance himself from Charles Fox (whose company he found delightful) by arguing that it had not been the act of a sovereign people; but he would not have found this difficult. Womersley might have gone deeper. That Gibbon should have envisaged the English succession as the third ...”

“... In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent virtues of failure), Charles Nicholl unearths more detail and offers more seductive speculation than any previous writer. With the vigorous Return of the Subject that besets many contemporary historians, he also can’t resist elbowing to the forefront with a Channel 4 expedition to ...”

“... from the one around them. In a bold-faced piece of bohemianism, the utopianists of Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the interior of New Holland (1837) hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which female ...”

“... at the Hawar Art Gallery beside the Tigris. ‘They’re going to burn the forest to kill the fox,’ Maher Samarai, a ceramicist, said. Shadid covered the long looting and burning of the forest with a sensitivity to the nuances of Iraqi life that eluded the war’s cheerleaders in much of the Anglo-American press. While colleagues embedded themselves ...”

“... Smith, sometimes he was Stewart, and sometimes he was Preston, but the most telling of the aliases Charles Stewart Parnell used to conduct the liaison with Mrs O’shea that eventually destroyed him was undoubtedly ‘Mr Fox’. Revealed by the divorce proceedings of November 1890, which, in wrecking his alliance with ...”

“... neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first ...”

“... were imagined not only as a formidable anti-radical force but as a force of nature. It shows Charles James Fox and other members of the parliamentary opposition attempting to haul to shore a landing craft crammed with an invasion force of the French Republic. In the sky is the head of Henry Dundas, the secretary of war ...”

“... same all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea ...”

“... a better choice this time’. In a long dissertation the Daily Telegraph, whose editor was then Charles Moore, told its readers that Duncan Smith saw things with ‘the eyes of a voter’ and had a better ‘estimation of the huge scale of the Tory task’ than Clarke did. Moreover, he had ‘a more thoughtful analysis of what has gone wrong’ and was ...”

“... in August 1637, aged 65, at the gate-house in Westminster where he lived his last years with a pet fox and a drunken housekeeper. His funeral was attended by ‘the greatest part of the nobilitie and gentry’, and a volume of memorial odes, Jonsonus Virbius, was published the following year. Here his disciples – the ‘Tribe of Ben’, as they were called ...”

“... son-in-law, the real estate scion and entrepreneur Jared Kushner. In 2005 Kushner’s father, Charles, was convicted of making illegal political donations, tax evasion and witness tampering. He had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, a witness for the prosecution, and mailed the tape of their hotel encounter to his sister on the day of a ...”

“... Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned here, and Charles Mackerras), friends and acquaintances suddenly turned into living corpses if they overstepped the mark. A joke would do it, and though Britten seems to have had plenty of childish jokes with his boy singers, his sense of humour isn’t much in evidence ...”

“... engaged in a war of liberation. The fellow-travelling attitude to IRA atrocities remains that of Charles James Fox to Napoleon, or the 1930s intellectuals to Stalin: regretting the deed, not for its effect on the victim, but for the damage done to the perpetrator’s reputation. Watching the social workers and polytechnic ...”

“... William Pitt – a pilot who in fact failed to weather the storm – but the raffish, unreliable Charles James Fox, another politician with no deep attachment to the social order. Certainly Churchill wanted to preserve ‘order’ – that is, the basic structure of government. When he believed that order was threatened by ...”