“... 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 ...”

“... and Antichrist. Collinson thought this was true only of extremists, those who were radicalised by Charles I’s religious policy in the 1630s, and that puritanism was initially and essentially a movement for reform within the Church of England. As a result, his work neglected the ‘Separatists’ – pissing-in rebels against orthodoxy – whom ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... pearl’. When Bertie got cold feet, Albert angrily told him he was duty-bound to propose. The hope was that marriage might finally correct the weakness the tutors had failed to deal with. Given this upbringing, the question was not whether Bertie would rebel, but how. Soon after his exciting trip to Paris, he and his 11-year-old brother Affie were caught ...”

“... Art’s Sake’ endeared him to the upper-class connoisseur, wrote, apropos of a Barbizon painter, Charles-François Daubigny: ‘It is really too bad that he … should be satisfied with an impression and should neglect details to the extent that he does. His pictures are nothing more than rough drafts left in a very unfinished state.’ Thirty years ...”

“... as a Zouave when the war began, was killed in one of the several futile battles fought in the hope of breaking the Paris siege. He was 28. Renoir was conscripted and sent to the Pyrenees, where he got dysentery and nearly died. Monet, who had done a tour in the army in the early 1860s, was called up, but absconded to England. Zola stayed in Paris (he ...”