“... would suffice (the tunic Mary wore at the annunciation is preserved at Chartres). In 1267, Charles II, count of Provence, dug up the bones in Vézelay that local tradition held were Mary Magdalene’s and took the left foot to St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume; thirteen years later he dug them up again and this time found a piece of ‘living skin’ – said ...”

“... discovery led Enrico Fermi in Rome to irradiate many different elements with neutrons in the hope that absorption of neutrons by their atomic nuclei would generate new radioactive elements. On irradiating the heaviest known elements, uranium and thorium, Fermi did indeed find radioactivities not ascribable to any known elements; he attributed some of ...”

“... apologetics for liberal society. We need an apologetics for liberalism which revolves around the hope that culture as a whole can be ‘aestheticised’ rather than around the Enlightenment hope that it might be ‘scientised’. Liberal politics is best suited to a culture whose hero is the strong poet rather than the ...”

“... Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political Violence in IrelandIn 1934, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote an essay called ‘Poets with History and Poets without History’. All poets, she said, belong to one or the other of these categories, and it becomes clear that the poet with ...”

“... Butt, who became a regular dinner guest at Wilde’s house in Westland Row, and the novelists Charles Lever and Sheridan Le Fanu. He also travelled to London and then to Vienna and Berlin to pursue his medical studies; he visited Prague, Munich and Brussels. In 1843 he published Austria, Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions, and in 1849 a ...”

“... the Two Acts in December 1795, and in that sense – as part of an alliance which stretched from Charles James Fox through the genteel supporters of the Society for Constitutional Information to the largely shopkeeper and artisan LCS – he did perform a leading role. With a scrupulous sense of this borderline distinction, Francis Place noted down Frend as ...”

“... other how intelligent they are, more subtlety than this might be expected of them, but we can only hope it. What were Adam Verver’s views on the great Free Trade debate, on woman suffrage, on child labour? We do not know. It is almost as if James wanted to protect his cherished creations from our knowledge of the banalities they would utter if he once let us ...”

“... Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration ...”

“... and, as the title intimates, in the analogy with the Victorian poverty investigated by Engels and Charles Booth. Here is the Indian lowness scanted in Naipaul’s book. An Area of Darkness is prone to India’s painful sights, and is eloquent about their effect on the Western visitor, with his burden of disorientation, anxiety and embarrassment; I can’t ...”

“... Cambridge, where he met Brooke, Ka Cox and Gwen Darwin, the daughter of a don and granddaughter of Charles Darwin. Later, both Darwin and Raverat studied art at the Slade. Virginia Woolf was fascinated by these Neo-Pagan entanglements, the sense of Rabelaisian sexuality, the counter-cultural world created around Brooke ...”

“... vicious satires against his betters and wound up raving; or the short, fat, gouty corrector Charles de la Motte, described as a ‘pygmy’, a ‘Lilliputian’ and ‘that little figure of papier-mâché’ by the contemporaries who hurled epithets at him with all the zest and accuracy of a literary darts team aiming at a target adorned with the face ...”

“... Is Mailer not, in Vidal’s throwaway line, one of the three Ms, along with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, ‘conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’? (His initial defence, if that is what it was, was to compile the table ‘Number of times married, Number of children, Number of ...”

“... were naturalised. They certainly played a part in bringing the Liberals back into power: in the hope that they would repeal the Aliens Act of 1905, which had so severely cut down the tide of immigration. But Dr Alderman is careful not to attribute too much to the Jewish vote, while at the same time noting the Jewish interest in issues which had nothing to ...”

“... adequate rejoinder from the British side so far has been Frank Kermode’s brilliant 1977-78 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, now published under the title The Genesis of Secrecy. Although fully aware of the subtleties of the deconstructivist case, he has yet entered a firm non placet to any form of that theory which tends towards a nihilism of ...”

“... argument for the Hexter case that there really was popular opposition to the proto-absolutism of Charles I. In Virginia there was no community sense, there were no autonomous villages, no towns: settlers with no shared roots in England spread themselves as widely as possible to grow the maximum amount of tobacco for the market, regardless of danger from ...”