“... The easterly trades, blowing relentlessly throughout the year, and against which they had no hope of sailing with their makeshift rigs, lay between them and the South American coast. Pollard was for sailing to Tahiti, in the Society Islands, two thousand miles away and an easy sail of several weeks at most. But Chase and Joy voiced strong opposition to ...”

“... gives an additional transgressive thrill because it’s not in the OED, and so offers the hope that I might have made it up – though, alas, I discover that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, used it to describe an addiction to technology. Ah well, my usage is etymologically purer because it preserves the sense of the Greek root -laliá, meaning ...”

“... have to others.’ Only when such connected and wide-angled histories were available, might one hope to ‘see all the order of time’. Spencer was writing to puff his translation of Bossuet’s Discourse on Universal History, a work the French theologian had embarked on in the 1670s while employed as tutor to Louis XIV’s heir. Interest in world history ...”

“... a series of biographical poems about scientists, inventors, engineers; a fair number of them – Charles Fourier, for example, and Wilhelm Reich – were completely crazy, though crazy in interesting ways. Enzensberger’s verse does two things superbly. It captures the mental states of its subjects (which often means their desolation or unhappiness), and it ...”

“... before he could become its first president); and he cleverly used a public lecture to explain to Charles Clarke, Blunkett’s successor at the Home Office, what Clarke shouldn’t have needed to have explained to him, namely that judges are ‘bound to take no notice’ of the views of government ministers, and so shouldn’t be expected to have cosy chats ...”

“... they favoured market-proven painting and sculpture over more experimental and critical forms. Charles Saatchi, an early backer of Hirst, was alert not only to the new investment potential of contemporary art but also to the publicity value of its more notorious players. The art market fell dramatically in 1990, three years after the stock market crash of ...”

“... and Dorothy Detail. A staff assistant called her Janie O. Gene Kelly called her Brunhilda. Bob Hope called her J.B. – for Jut Butt. Jerry Lewis called her Sylvia, but James Garner called her Sylvia-honey. Rock Hudson called her Eunice and sometimes Maude; she called him Ernie. Her son called her Sis. The character actor Billy de Wolfe called her Clara ...”

“... calls on the answering machine. From my mother: ‘Sean! You’re a father! Hooray! Let’s hope he doesn’t have too many of our crazy genes.’ From my drawling Uncle Charles, in Houston: ‘Owen Taylor is a very masculine name. Very male.’ Then ‘Hi Sean. Or Mr Wilsey. This is Sid from the New York City ...”

“... and Sir William Parker, who himself thought he was a fraction past it at 73. Which left only Sir Charles Napier, a mere 67 but a hopeless alcoholic with a vile temper. The commander-in-chief was the 66-year-old Lord Raglan, who had lost an arm at Waterloo but had never commanded so much as a battalion in the field. He was selected partly because he could ...”

“... was completely off the map.’ He sinks into the comforts of a less inscrutable world: that of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. The comic strip, read by millions of Americans, is the centre of Franzen’s childhood imaginative life: ‘Like most of the nation’s ten-year-olds, I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a ...”

“... projects, this excessively long biography offers both ugly revelations and moving insights. Born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, the son of Swiss parents, a father who enamelled watchcases and a piano teacher mother, Le Corbusier was a man of apparently absolute precision in everything he did, from his obsessive timekeeping to the organisation of his own ...”

“... is one that has specifically hung over modernist women. The most notable case is that of Hope Mirrlees, whose long poem Paris appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1920, more than two years before the American edition of The Waste Land and three years before the British one (also from the Hogarth Press). Despite this, Paris is frequently read as coming ...”

“... is sometimes open to question. Political cartoonists sometimes depicted Lincoln in the guise of Charles Blondin, a tightrope walker famous for crossing Niagara Falls on a high wire, navigating a dangerous course without leaning too far to the left or right. Reynolds describes Lincoln as a ‘political Blondin’, who chose an ideologically balanced ...”

“... that is associated with our region is accompanied by passivity and dependence and I see no present hope for allaying it. I have come full circle in my thinking and have reluctantly concluded that the poverty that called into being the Appalachian Regional Commission is largely genetic in origin and is largely irreducible.’ In the autumn of 1990, Caudill ...”

“... into a lake for a swim. Her horse bolts, and she chases after it, still naked. Audiences went in hope of pornography but many were disappointed, judging by the catcalls and hissing at screenings from Berlin to Paris and New York. What they got was a lot of highfalutin symbolism involving horses and a glimpse or two of the upper torso of a shivering teenage ...”