“... to a wide audience. Most publishers’ contracts have a clause about cartoon rights: let’s hope Gellner hasn’t signed his away. We literary critics are wiser. For us, seamless textuality makes the world, from Mallarmé to the News at Ten, indeterminate. Having read Rorty, we know that Freud’s a ‘strong poet’ and that, swerve and dribble as we ...”

“... They had doctors in the family, and crofters; the sort of people, she said, who had followed Charles Edward Stuart to the water’s edge. And she knew all the songs. Margaret told me once of her last days at Muir of Ord. She would go down the glen with her drawing-book and her colours, beyond the fir trees and the water over stones, to the open ...”

“... and outlives the majority of human passions: Dante’s is one of those which one can only just hope to grow up to at the end of life.’ Moreover, Eliot was sceptical about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is ...”

“... or dismissed as merely imaginary. The sincere man, the honest consciousness, had a reasonable hope of grasping it at last. But now Trilling finds himself confronted with a literature and a culture in which sincerity and the honest consciousness are only impotent survivals; and he comes to terms with that state of affairs in his last and finest ...”

“... stereotypes himself as the grammar-school boy perverted by his ‘milieu’ (fellow-con Charles Richardson’s Open University-speak), Boyle creates an extraordinarily vivid and well-written portrait of the criminal as a young urchin. It is done without nostalgia, posing or special pleading. The childhood chapters are far and away the best thing in ...”

“... in the physiognomies of the insane – although, as Janet Browne points out in her account of Charles Darwin’s encounter with this approach, it seems that what the psychiatrist could see in the photographs of madmen was simply not visible to the layman.) This separation means that even if we acknowledge the objectivity of a natural history of ...”

“... the strike. Pulling his many strings – among them Routledge’s editor at the Times, the late Charles Douglas-Home – he got commissions for articles about the coalfields which he wrote while engaged on reconnaissance missions. Hart spotted, and helped to sponsor, the rebels and working miners; he organised secret meetings, held MacGregor’s hand when ...”

“... used the seductive physical power of music with the intensity and the range of Mozart,’ says Charles Rosen in The Classical Style. Glenn Gould thought Mozart’s music was ‘hedonist’. The immediacy of Mozart’s music can be spooky. That simple four-note figure repeated twice, the viola motif in the slow movement of the G minor String ...”

“... of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice. They outpolled Adams and his running mate, Charles Pinckney, but in order for Jefferson to become president, one or more Republican electors had to avoid voting for Burr. They failed to get the message. Jefferson and Burr both ended up with 73 electoral votes, sending the contest to the House of ...”

“... abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic prosperity that ‘true British rule’ promised. When such approaches were rebuffed, anticolonialism and independence gradually came to seem the more likely route towards self-rule and equality. But as late as the interwar period ...”

“... everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from Bukowski’s poem ‘Nirvana’.) It was in Portland that he met his first ...”

“... In Ireland, for example, the cattle trade had been crippled by a British embargo from the days of Charles II. As well as the denial of religious and political rights, Burke inveighed against the restrictions on the export of linen, wool and beer which the Irish Parliament had been strong-armed to pass into law. Such impositions remind us of the ‘Unequal ...”

“... anonymous consumers of pornography, and the Holy Roman Emperor. Correggio’s Loves were given to Charles V by Federico Gonzaga; Perino’s tapestries were woven for his visit to Genoa, and the gallery of Francis I was hurriedly completed for Charles’s visit in 1539. To a remarkable degree the audience for all these ...”

“... parallel universe, a parallel Martin Amis is dreaming up a potplant-lecturing, tampon-envying Charles III.) Henry has a tremendously posh voice (‘My mind’s a blenk’); he is pampered and cosseted and none too bright, given to calling things ‘ghastly’ or ‘a curate’s egg’. Otherwise, he comes across as a fairly likeable ...”

“... trees shedding their bark. I had seen a photo of the Red Army marching down Richelieu Street in Charles King’s book Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams. It is 1944 and the opera house is in the background, more or less intact. The port appears behind it. From the top of the Potemkin steps you can see ships lined up to receive timber, coal, iron ...”