“... herself repeating Vic’s Daily Mail-style arguments to her academic colleagues, and not least to Charles, her unsatisfactory lover. Charles, a fellow de-constructionist, promptly takes the hint and abandons academic life (and Robyn too), to take up merchant banking. If intellectual life, like buying and selling, is only a ...”

“... such book: his resolution was to ‘place on record an account of my own life and career in the hope that the pathway from childhood in Glasgow to a Nobel Prize, the House of Lords and the Presidency of the Royal Society might prove of some interest.’ He is of course perfectly entitled to take this view, but I expect most readers will find it, as I ...”

“... Jagger.Meanwhile,​ things were not going well at home. Glenconner by now had five children: Charles, Henry, Christopher and the twins May and Amy. Their father found it difficult to be ‘affectionate or tactile’ with them and Glenconner, still following the pattern set in her own family, felt it was more ‘urgent’ to be a wife than a mother. She ...”

“... the Baltic coast and, in his own way, he fitted in. In December 1974 he started going by the name Charles. He walked into the Napier in the middle of a Christmas party – ‘a heavy, powerful man’, a former fireman interviewed for Stern magazine recalled. ‘Oh there’s Charlie!’ one of the regulars shouted. Johnson corrected him: ‘No, Charlie is ...”

“... nationalists began to organise for a revolution – that anyway is the interpretation which Jean-Charles Jauffret has put on the documents he edited. These reveal in detail how the French military failed, on numerous occasions, to understand what was happening and how the various intelligence organisations were often ignorant of one another’s ...”

“... Cherkley Court, and there would open the interconnecting door between her bedroom and his in the hope that she would signify consent by leaving it ajar. Once, when he was talking about a woman with whom he (rightly) suspected Pincher was having an affair, he ‘puckered his face into a leery smile’ and declared: ‘I bet she’s got a big bush!’ Pincher ...”

“... highwaymen operating on the main roads into London, they would hire coaches or post-chaises in the hope of being held up. The six men who formed the Bow Street front line were supported by a small clerical staff, whose duties included advertising crimes in the newspapers (to solicit witnesses and alert pawnbrokers) and keeping the record books, which would ...”

“... an Islamic France. In 1959, three years before he presided over the end of Algérie française, Charles de Gaulle told his confidant Alain Peyrefitte that France would have to withdraw from Algeria, because the alternative – full French citizenship for the indigènes – would turn it into an Islamic state: Do you believe that the French nation can ...”

“... the ideas of the movement he founded.Christopher Riedweg’s book is dedicated to Burkert, while Charles Kahn thanks Burkert for ‘superlative’ comments on the manuscript he sent to the publisher. Whenever Pythagoreanism comes up for scholarly study, the Burkert revelation is now everywhere, the anxiety of his influence omnipresent – but with different ...”

“... hostility: ‘Is it rapture or terror that circles me round, and invades/Each vein of my life with hope – if it be not fear?’ These emotions signal the presence of Pan, ‘in each life living … the God who art all’. Pan is all sides of the case: killer and victim, life and death, ‘rapture or wrath’, or in another brilliant sound coinage, the ...”

“... Ireland, a position in which he served two seven-year terms. Duffy was the son of Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, who was arrested for sedition on the eve of the 1848 Rebellion, but not convicted. In 1855, disappointed with the progress of the Tenants’ Right Party, which he had founded and represented at Westminster, ...”

“... pay her way, Keynes regretted ‘the celebrated inefficiency of British manufacturers’: the only hope, he thought, was for ‘the American Air Force (it is now too late to hope for much from the enemy) by some sad geographic slip to destroy every factory on the North-East coast and in Lancashire (at an hour when the ...”

“... you a journalist?’ (their italics). Bloody-minded, I could never resist answering: ‘I hope I still am.’ The deeply ambivalent professional relations of the academy with the press are another story. But they feed the general damaging reluctance to understand that any print journalism worth reading must by the same token be writing, in its own ...”

“... rather obscured by glossing political action merely as the gauging of efficient means to ends. As Charles Taylor (the Canadian politician and philosopher, not the Liberian gunslinger) has pointed out, dousing the Vietnamese population in Agent Orange is only prima facie comprehensible as the upshot of a cost/benefit util-tot. It is better seen ...”

“... animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed fragments. Nobody seems to be listening. Last year set records: even without counting the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of ...”