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“... or bad, clever or stupid? Stendhal asks himself in the summer of 1832 is the opening of a poem by Charles Boyle. Wet from the shower    towelling your breasts you ask me if I’ve read    Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic goes Michael Hulse’s poem ‘Fornicating and Reading the Papers’. Meanwhile, Didsbury has ‘The sky is like an entry in ...”

“... successors by Professor Robert Mandrou. In this context it is interesting to note that Charles Miron, Bishop of Angers, who exposed Marthe as a fraud with almost casual ease before she even reached Paris, was himself the son of Henri III’s premier médecin. Marescot’s report on the affaire Brossier was published by the French government with an ...”

“... In March​ 1718, 13-year-old William Murray, the 11th of Viscount Stormont’s 14 children, set off from the family seat at Scone, near Perth, on a pony. The journey to London, which he made alone, took him almost two months, and it is probable that he never saw Scotland again. Although it was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone as a scholar ...”

“... these studies I changed my mind about ‘the Puritan Revolution’. In an important new book, Charles I and the Popish Plot, Caroline Hibbard has tackled the origins of the Civil War by documenting the Catholic intrigue at the Court of Charles I from the late 1630s to the outbreak of Civil War. Her findings complement ...”

“... of the brightest, Major Dwight Eisenhower, retreated to Washington after a few years. The oddest, Charles Willoughby, who had begun life as Karl von Tscheppe-Weidenbach, was the son of a German father and an American mother. A fussy one-time historian with a thick accent and pince-nez on a silk cord, he became MacArthur’s intelligence chief, and stayed ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”

“... but leaving Britain in darkness. In Reflections on the Decline of Science in England (1830), Charles Babbage argued that the problem was deep and systemic: a professional revolution was required to place science at the helm of the national economy. In France the sciences led to well-paid and prestigious careers; in Britain their practitioners were for ...”

“... a different period. In 1971 Busner thinks about decimalisation; in 2010 he listens to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. Self has a wonderful ear for accent and idiom, and uses this to signal changes of time or perspective. When she’s recalling her youth Audrey speaks (but doesn’t always think) in a pared-down version of the phonetic mockney Self ...”

“... glued-on’. The illegibility of her handwriting was also notorious. Her publisher and friend Jock Murray tells of tackling a passage at the bottom of a letter, which had defeated everyone else, and eventually deciphering the words: ‘Dearest Jock, I can’t read what I have written. Please type it out and send a copy to me.’ In a chapter​ of her ...”

“... and I can remove the ‘perhaps’ in the footnote: Rex Mottram in Brideshead Revisited gives Charles Ryder a meal in Paris which started as saddle of hare and became pressed duck, ‘to allow’, Davis explains, ‘ “the music of the press” to punctuate the meal luxuriously’. A remaining mention of the discarded hare must have been pointed out and ...”

“... of concerts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, then run by another cultivated Brit, Sir Charles Moses. Goossens found an ‘immense spirit and enthusiasm’ for the musical arts, but nowhere to satisfy them beyond Sydney Town Hall, a wedding-cake confection in Second Empire style with fuzzy acoustics, seating at best 2500. Like many ...”

“... in 1859, with a high quality of fiction and investigative reportage, by the 1870s (in the hands of Charles Jr), the paper is a vehicle for hack serials and featherweight journalism for the tyrannous family reader. As will be evident, BLM’s definition of what constitutes a literary magazine is broad, verging on indiscriminate. Woman’s World and Vanity Fair ...”

“... modernity of contemporary England and the apostasy of its people from the Anglican faith of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Given the chance, he would restore in modern dress the divine right of kings and the doctrinal authority of a state church preaching supernatural Christianity. Wright and Cowling have much in common in their alienation from society ...”

“... of the Night doesn’t seem to have been a pagan goddess. But the possibility was seized on by Charles Godfrey Leland, an American folklorist. His Aradia: The Gospel of the Witches, published in 1899, professes to be the gospel of a previously unknown witch-religion practised by a secret society in northern Italy; Leland claimed he had been given the text ...”

“... founded as a haven by and for outsiders. In 1917 the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, dismissed several professors for protesting against America’s entry into World War One. This precipitated the resignations of two leading historians, Charles Beard and James Robinson, both of whom had long ...”