“... 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 ...”

“... of ecstasy and the recurring moments of horror’. Eliot identifies the presence of the latter in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, in which he claims there is no ‘exploitation of the supernatural for the sake of the immediate shudder’. There are shudder-inducing images of horror in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion, figures of nightmare and ...”

“... Kossuth; from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri-Clérel de Tocqueville, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to ...”

“... life from his literary output: fact and fiction repeatedly inform each other. He told Charles Scribner II, his publisher, that his next novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), concerned ‘the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33rd years. He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative ...”

“... little, or perhaps it’s the other way round. Elsewhere Auden quotes from one of his touchstones, Charles Williams, who writes of overwhelming yet undefinable moments, those in which ‘a hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence.’ From the start, the Auden effect was an odd blend ...”

“... of his intended research, and testimonials from Bruce Richmond, the editor of the TLS, and Charles Whibley, a conservative literary journalist, stalwart of Blackwood’s Magazine and fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In his research proposal, Eliot explained how he would extend and, with an eye to the college’s reputation in history, substantiate ...”

“... they will sell a corporation’s shares and a lower price at which they will buy them, in the hope of earning the ‘spread’ between the two prices – but they revise prices as market conditions change far faster than any human being can. Their doing so is almost certainly the main component of the flood of orders and cancellations that follows even ...”

“... sex equally – would probably be thought grossly authoritarian. (The utopian socialist Charles Fourier proposed a guaranteed ‘sexual minimum’, akin to a guaranteed basic income, for every man and woman, regardless of age or infirmity; only with sexual deprivation eliminated, Fourier thought, could romantic relationships be truly free. This ...”

“... But an investigation by the Washington Post revealed that another contact of Danchenko’s, Charles Dolan Jr, an American PR executive, was likely to have been behind the ‘pee tape’ claims. This was also the conclusion of Special Counsel John Durham’s exhaustive report into Russiagate, published in 2023. Dolan worked on Bill Clinton’s 1992 ...”

“... to survive and write his major work, the Discorsi. But while Brecht was reworking the play with Charles Laughton in 1945, the first nuclear bomb was dropped at Hiroshima, and he felt that ‘overnight the biography of the founder of modern physics read differently.’ Because, as he said, ‘the atomic bomb has really made the relationship between society ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Nixon Administration, but the President and Kissinger didn’t know that. Nixon therefore ordered Charles Colson, an official on his staff, to come up with a plan to ‘neutralise’ Ellsberg. Colson in turn enlisted the services of a former CIA officer called Howard Hunt, who had been the mastermind behind the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Hunt had ...”

“... the daylights out of the South so as to soften up the opposition before the main assault. Like Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, like the conservatives and liberals who argued for war in 2003, and said that Saddam Hussein, the Hitler of our time, must not be appeased, and this mustn’t turn into Munich all over again, Adelman demanded ...”

“... and finally in England, one of a circle of painters that included Anthony van Dyck at the Court of Charles I, the most important collector of paintings of the age. As the principal relation of Artemisia’s life is to this severe, rejecting father, the most amply and thrillingly narrated event in the novel is the journey Artemisia makes alone, by sea and ...”

“... even by the industrial East. Stanford’s fellow tycoons in these projects were Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker and Collis P. Huntington – ‘and their corruption was as big as their profit,’ Solnit says. These ‘Big Four’, all former Sacramento storekeepers who had sold goods to Gold Rush miners, had come to monopolise political and economic power ...”