“... and unknowable was also what she wrote about best. It’s said that the reclusive French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan rented a house in Paris with two front doors, so that whenever someone called at one of them, he could claim he had been in the other part of the house and hadn’t heard the bell. Haushofer divided her life after the war between Vienna and ...”

“... it on the Centre-Right. The Conservatives had, I think, little option but to do what they did and hope for the best. After all, fear of the outside world and its dangers is what Thatcherism is about, and the Party is still Thatcherite. That is the source of their problems. The first problem is the Conservative model of British society. The Tories fought the ...”

“... the strap is slack, since England is half-heartedly posing for the cameraman, her then lover Charles Graner, so that he would have ‘a souvenir’. ‘The picture isn’t about Gus being dominated by England,’ commented one reviewer of the book. ‘It’s about England being dominated by Graner.’ One can do a few riffs on the phallocentricity of the ...”

“... mirrors. But there is, in addition, strong institutional endorsement from the museums that hope to receive, or at least to borrow, some of this art – and, perhaps surprisingly, a background of popular enthusiasm.Since so much of the most expensive contemporary art claims descent from the self-consciously avant-garde art of the early 20th century it ...”

“... 1949. She makes a cameo as the magazine’s ‘resident Circe’ in a biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Was it the clothes? As a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Brennan wore white gloves to the office, and her vintage wardrobe and showy ...”

“... she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became admirals, served on at least ten naval sodomy trials between them, eight of these before Mansfield Park was published. And she wasn’t too delicate to risk such an allusion. Many years after Austen’s death, her favourite ...”

“... portrait by his UN colleague Brian Urquhart, and a perceptive study by the Berkeley historian Charles Henry that treats Bunche both as a significant figure in his own right and as a prism through which to examine America’s racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his ...”

“... from Saussure and French structuralism – which descends from the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce. Here the main stress is not so much on achieving a unified general theory as on getting people (theorists included) to recognise the variety of meanings and purposes at work in human communication. For Peirce, there is no end to the ...”

“... by medals or publicity, is asked of those who, when filthy, hungry and exhausted, often without hope of relief or even survival, hold positions against repeated attacks or prolonged shelling, and can still overcome doubt and fear enough to function. It is this less flashy form of courage that is more useful in high command. By the end of the war, MacArthur ...”

“... communism’ and against US citizenship for Natives, while the Santee Dakota doctor Charles Eastman believed that Native Americans could have a productive relationship as US nationals while retaining cultural autonomy. Other Natives embraced the terms of integration, such as Eastman’s contemporary, the Kaw ...”

“... the Promised Land’. Nearly forty years later anti-Union resentment was strong enough to carry Charles Edward Stuart close to an overthrow not just of the Treaty but of the Hanoverian state. Only after the 1745 rebellion did conditions improve enough to resemble the changes promised an earlier generation. This time-lapse is another feature which places the ...”

“... Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and – as the novel itself develops – by the idea of solitude. It becomes important to the novel that its key scenes should occur when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no ...”

“... in me: ‘I’d like to be buried in a little grave right next to yours.’ When I say that I hope this won’t be quite yet she says, ‘Well, I’m the same age as you,’ as if this somehow made our posthumous propinquity more of a likelihood. 27 May. Ashcroft, the US attorney general, applies for the extradition of Abu Hamza, the radical Muslim ...”

“... Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed that her Low ...”

“... what I thought of Hitler’, and she was intensely proud of the British Empire. According to Sir Charles Powell, probably the most influential private secretary she had in Downing Street, the Prime Minister was in thrall to childhood memories. ‘For a small girl growing up in Grantham the Germans were about as evil as anything you could think of.’ In that ...”