“... she met Thistlewood, selling food and animals in the informal trading networks that gave modest hope to Caribbean blacks. Thistlewood looked after her money, and even borrowed from her early in his career. In 1760 she gave birth to his son, and he set aside money in his will for Phibbah to buy her freedom. It’s hard to contest Walvin’s verdict that ...”

“... have been writing. Some examples: ‘She had a face like an upturned canoe,’ said by the actor Charles Gray at breakfast in Dundee (though of whom I can’t remember). A. I’ve been salmon fishing. B. It’s not the season. A. No. I thought I’d take the blighters by surprise. ‘Here we are. Fat Pig One and Fat Pig Two.’ Said by my mother when ...”

“... appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A ...”

“... who were more interested in eating than talking and who thus presented less of a social peril. Charles Boyer, for example, who was appearing next door to us on 45th Street in Rattigan’s Man and Boy. With Leslie Howard he had been a particular heart-throb of Mam’s. Now, napkin tucked under his chin and in that all too imitable accent in which he’d ...”

“... published a translation of French fairy tales of the 17th and 18th centuries, the bulk of them by Charles Perrault, with others by Mme D’Aulnoy and Mme Leprince. The collection included ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Puss in Boots’. This was a change of direction for ...”

“... that the shower scene changed the movies for ever, as well as apparently preparing the way for Charles Manson and Ozzy Osborne, Skerry makes much of the nipple, the stabbing knife and the first flushing toilet bowl on screen, all of which Hitchcock managed to get past the Production Code people. Leigh, in Skerry’s interview and in the Bouzereau ...”

“... the increasingly restive crowd: shaking their pop-bead rosaries and warbling rude jests about Charles and Camilla and the tampon. The Reverend seemed unaware of the blaspheming Sisters – though, it’s true, might not have got the jokes even if he had been. A few overwrought misfits were now also shrieking and booing. Local screamers. Rev. Cecil sailed ...”

“... name. Other reviews I’ve seen have been pretty much raves. ‘Whooooosssh! What a trip,’ says Charles Spencer at the Telegraph: ‘it is an absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate ...”

“... and in hypertrophied verse urged the patriots ‘Like nightly watchers from a palace tower/In hope and faith and patience strong to wait/The beacons on the heights’. He returned in 1829 from a trip to Burgos, Madrid, Granada, Alicante and Valencia with a sense of ‘23 years of existence squandered away’, and desperate to bridge the gap between poetry ...”

“... to make the return trip if they do – crabbed obsessives just aren’t good company, which makes Charles Kinbote in Pale Fire a harder narrator to sell than the suavely sulphurous Humbert Humbert. The obvious answer to X.’s rhetorical question is that Jenn wanted a baby and therefore more space, and managed not to notice that there was no room in her ...”

“... a familiar face at the casino. Guillaume, meanwhile, was enrolled in the exclusive Collège Saint-Charles, where he did well, winning numerous prizes. Apollinaire probably picked up from Walt Whitman his habit of naming himself in his poems: ‘Je me disais Guillaume il est temps que tu viennes’ (‘I said to myself Guillaume it is time that you ...”

“... rules. Most states became states because of external threats, or, in the words of the sociologist Charles Tilly: ‘War made the state, and the state made war.’ By contrast, the EU as we know it has grown out of a market project; states may be able to make a market, but a market won’t make a state. The European elites simply do not agree on what it would ...”

“... government offensive in Syria’s Idlib province had glowing reviews from commentators such as Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, who wrote that the weapons had ‘transformed the strategic dynamic 180 degrees’ in Idlib in just five days. The enthusiasm is easy to fathom. Drones create their own marketing commercials in the ...”

“... was born in June 1948, which makes him the same age as Ian McEwan and a few months older than King Charles. Like McEwan, he spent his earliest years in Tripoli – his father, like McEwan’s, was posted there as a British army officer – and was sent back aged eleven to an England still shaped by the war, for a boarding school education at the hands of ...”

“... took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated Baxter’s useful skill with ...”