“... a member of the Royal Adventurers Company from 1663, and, from 1672 – when he was appointed by Charles II as the First Lord of Trade and Plantations – its successor body, the Royal Africa Company, a chartered organisation which attempted to gain a monopoly over the English slave trade.There are rivers still named Ashley and Cooper in the 1st earl’s ...”

“... supposed to have died, alone, unknown, a stranger to his wife and his sons, in a furnished room on Charles Street. My own father spent two or three years in his late seventies alone at the farm in Hanover. The only heat was a fireplace; his only companion a halfwit who lived up the road. I lived as a young man in cold, ugly and forsaken places yearning for a ...”

“... first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the philosopher-king. This expresses the hope that even in contemporary mass democracies a figure will emerge who can work the political machine and at the same time embody intellect, sensibility and liberal values, someone who can win power and then exercise it in the name of reason and ...”

“... Jews. Given a spell of German discipline, the French might yet pull themselves together: but what hope was there for the Jews with their non-European, ‘foreign blood’? At the rather abstract level of discourse preferred by the young de Man, there was not much need to be as specific and insistent as some of his fellow contributors, either about Jews or ...”

“... he had the kind of background Channon yearned for: a Nicolson baronetcy had been created by Charles I, and on his mother’s side he was related to the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Where some people reinvent themselves to disguise a lowly upbringing, Channon tried desperately to shed his origins as the son of a rich shipowner – ‘I have put my whole ...”

“... speeds and trying not to make eye contact. Though its construction was inspired by the idealistic Charles Pearson, born in 1793, the Metropolitan was intended, like all railway projects of the era, to be a hard-nosed, profit-making, capitalist enterprise. It’s not that simple now, and it was not that simple in Victorian times. From the outset, the ...”

“... efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... this new version of Defoe’s tour, we are merely escaping – borrowing the flush of economic hope from the 1720s, revelling at once in the period’s quaintness and its sense of opportunity. At the same time that Defoe was travelling on the muddy highways and muddier byways of England and Scotland, a young poet, James Thomson (b. 1700), was roaming the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Institute for Psychical Research, came to stay with the Irvings for seven days in the hope of observing Gef at first hand. He had first become interested in Gef in 1935, and was increasingly determined to meet the mongoose for himself, even though Irving assured him it was unlikely he would get the chance to converse with Gef, who was more ...”

“... by the chemical industry after the book’s publication – is profoundly inspiring at a time when hope in such endeavours seems to be in short supply. There is much to be learned from her methods. Carson was alerted to the problem of toxic chemicals poisoning animal populations by a letter from Olga Owens Huckins, a gardener and birdwatcher who witnessed a ...”