“... 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 ...”

“... phenomenon. He saw them as objects of quasi-religious longing, ‘technological angels’ offering hope of spiritual redemption in a secular, science-stunned age. In recent decades they’ve often been described in more menacing terms, but that hasn’t invalidated Jung’s central point: the way a society talks about UFOs provides insights into its deepest ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... given as a gift by the Emperor Bahadur Shah to the Portuguese, who then offered them as a dowry to Charles II at the time of his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. What was one to do with such a dowry? Well, through a process of reclamation, the seven fishing islands became Bombay. As Saleem Sinai says (after reciting the opening stanza of the Cathedral and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”