“... night,’ so he tells Arthur, his older son. ‘Maybe one day you’ll have one like it too. I hope you will.’ Arthur nods curtly, more pained than embarrassed. He can’t bear born-again Christians: they don’t even believe the revelations of Charles Darwin. Arthur was out with his girl while Robbie was in his agony ...”

“... this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His wife (thought to have been his cook) was a competent businesswoman and, unexpectedly, a good shot with a revolver. Mary learned from her the ...”

“... spend the war years as Connolly’s live-in lover, organiser and helpmeet, living in perpetual hope that Connolly would divorce his American wife, Jean, which he didn’t. Eventually Jean died, but by then Connolly was in love with Barbara Skelton, and Lys was a nervous wreck from having been, as she put it, ‘played around with so much’.Was Lys ever so ...”

“... the cod fishery on the Grand Banks has been devastating to these townships. Some cling on in the hope that cod will make a comeback as a result of the fishing moratorium which has been in force since 1990. But they still haven’t, unlike the North Sea cod, which returned in 1919 after four years’ disruption to fishing caused by submarine warfare. Nature ...”

“... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...”

“... was categorically told ‘by an authority on Irish politics’ that as a foreigner he ‘could not hope to understand the dynamic of Irish nationalism ... there was no sociological, sectarian or class problem or angle in it from beginning to end.’ However, Lenin and Connolly chose to believe that Ireland had to be independent before the workers could rightly ...”

“... hundred years ago in 1795, leaving behind a massive cache of highly personal manuscripts in the hope that their publication would pay his debts, finance his children and perpetuate his name. Instead, the frankness of some of their content caused them to be hidden away for more than a century, Boswell’s Victorian descendants even allowing it to be thought ...”

“... Jefferson, and espoused a leftish liberalism intended to recall America to her mission as the best hope of the common man rather than the conservative super-power she has too often become. At the same time, he has preached the need to marry Marx and Jefferson to anyone who would listen in Eastern Europe, in an effort to drag Communist regimes back into the ...”

“... Jesuit Desideri, who wrote about Lhasa in the early 18th century, and, in the 20th century, Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson, British scholars and diplomats who both spoke Tibetan, and two Austrian mountaineers, Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who landed there for several years after escaping from British internment in India during World War ...”

“... Wife of the Above’ I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations A book about the delights and healing effects of reading, recalling the novels about precocious readers and intellectual explorers that many of us grew up with, South Pacific cousin to Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and ...”

“... threshold of shame about bodily functions’, to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of ‘sympathy’. She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that ‘an almost complete ...”

“... more than 150 illustrations.‘I do warrant you,’ the lord admiral of the English fleet, Charles Howard of Effingham, reported from his flagship, ‘all the world never saw such a force as theirs.’ When it left Lisbon harbour on 28 May 1588, the Armada comprised 150 vessels, ranging from thousand-ton merchantmen to small felucca message boats. The ...”

“... times per day, five days per week.’ He’s moved on from Wilde to the works of his great-uncle Charles Maturin (specifically the Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer), developed a taste for classical music and Italian Renaissance art, and begun to think of the management of his panic attacks in religious terms: grace (the mouse in the tunnel) and works (the ...”

“... detachment that almost eliminates the first person. She seems to achieve the split we all dread or hope for; she seems to stand in the dark looking in through a lighted window at her own figure by the lamp.’ Hugh Walpole compared the experience of reading the memoir to discovering the first volume of Proust or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. ‘I shall push and ...”

“... enjoy the security of their rights, their commerce and their civilisation’. The line belongs to Charles-Louis Lesur, writing just before the Grande Armée’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812, but it could be used to describe today’s European military strategy. Each side still sees the other as expansionist and tyrannical. As the political scientist ...”