“... Grub Street Cleopatra on her barge. As a junior member of the Cabinet with intellectual leanings, Charles Masterman had been charged with doing something that would produce effective propaganda for the Allied cause, especially in the neutral United States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William ...”

“... to include a staggering array of post-colonial writers, from Chinua Achebe to Alice Munro to Les Murray. (None of the ten 20th-century authors added to this edition is English.) The Longman translates US multiculturalism more obliquely into UK devolution, turning inward to trace cultural differences within the British Isles, from the 14th-century Welsh ...”

“... am glad you think I am better at love-making,’ Buchan wrote in a letter to Gilbert Murray. ‘I hate the stuff. I sit and blush with disgust when I am writing it.’ So flirtation and sexual tension were largely off the table as a means of punching up his dialogue. But Buchan still aimed to give his characters’ language a racy, informal ...”

“... passionate but unconsummated love affair with Richard Doughty-Wylie (nephew of the great explorer Charles Doughty), whom she had met when he was British Consul in Konya. Doughty-Wylie was married, and was not prepared to risk his career by leaving his wife. A man with physical courage to match Gertrude’s, he was killed a year later at Gallipoli, in an ...”

“... The first Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England was Charles Russell, in 1894, a man whose benignly Victorian image looked down on me almost every day of my teenage life. He was by a long way my Dublin secondary school’s most famous old boy from the days before Independence and his portrait hung in the school hall ...”

“... a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club, in Dawson Street, was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss politics. He played an active part in the 1880 elections to the Westminster Parliament, helping ensure that the two Conservative candidates standing in his ...”

“... wore in The Misfits. He frames them and hangs them up in his apartment. He gets the pleasure of Charles I pacing a banqueting hall replete with Van Dycks. Hilfiger gets to feel he has captured the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags. Going, going. Gone. But what of poor Marilyn herself? What is ...”

“... Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages ...”

“... flush out the devout, the fluent genuflection before entering the pew the first indicator. Charles Moore sinks to his knees straightaway and prays for a considerable period of time, and Piers Paul Read similarly. Some admiration for this, men who pray in public not uncourageous, though more often met with at Catholic rather than Anglican services. The ...”

“... to museums, including the Met in New York, into sales. A more curious recent case is that of Charles Saatchi, described by de Pury as ‘the advertising mogul who became the Iraqi Cosimo Medici of the Young British Artists’. He is not generally considered an art dealer but rather a new style of art patron and art broker. He donates works to museums but ...”

“... Disaster at the Trebia’) or the mortally wounded soldier – in this case, the poet’s ancestor Charles Russell Lowell – having himself tied on to his horse. Something about these often garish poems is half-grown and not quite serious. It is even possible that the best of it is an outrageous silliness, as here in ‘Attila, Hitler’: ‘Attila mounted on ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from giving up on America. My guides to the meaning of American democracy, and to what Albert Murray called the ‘mulatto textures’ of American culture, weren’t the Founding Fathers. They were Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Miles ...”

“... his Netherlands provinces to the home-ruling and ungarrisoned status they had enjoyed under Charles V and to grant them some measure of religious toleration’. But Philip regarded Elizabeth’s support for the Dutch as a war-like act and his direct response was to launch the Armada. England’s naval victory in 1588 was followed in the same year by a ...”

“... The Government went to court and asked for injunctions. The judge chosen to try the case, Murray Gurfein, had been a military intelligence officer during the war – a fact that did not encourage the Times’s lawyers. He began with expressions of concern for the national security. But when he asked the official witnesses to point to particular ...”