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“... and deep reasons for admiring The Fountain. I quickly suppressed my almost Pavlovian sneer at Charles Morgan, and realised that what she found in the book is the thing that matters. (Not that this alters my opinion about Charles Morgan, but it made me dubious about the whole business of literary criticism. I ...”

“... as they do to the spirit of the age in which they appear. The Fountain, the novel which made Charles Morgan’s reputation, came out in 1932 and had a very considerable succès d’estime. It was much admired in France, where Morgan still has a solid reputation. Valéry admired it, writing that in ...”

“... is certainly connected with the Dostoevskian legacy. He is popular there in much the same way that Charles Morgan became a popular ‘spiritual’ novelist in France. Certainly Greene established popular prototypes, even if he did not create them, and they may well survive in the form he gave them, rather like the heroes and heroines of the old romances ...”

“... that Moore, having kindled the world’s sympathy for a wronged maidservant, was capable, if Charles Morgan is right, of hurling his boots at a housemaid who displeased him; and, if William Butler Yeats is right, of quarrelling violently with a sacked cook and a policeman over whether an omelette was fit to eat. Wary, one suspects, of being seen by ...”

“... describes in his biography of his aunt Marianne Thornton (there was a brick in the pantry with ‘Charles Morgan Forster’ incised upon it). Since Forster was about the only writer the teenage Motion had heard of, he sent news to King’s College of this extraordinary coincidence: ‘I thought he’d probably want to know about it,’ the present-day ...”

“... the Oxford University Dramatic Society produced The Dynasts, Hardy wrote to the stage-manager, Charles Morgan, asking that, instead of being seated in the audience, he be placed ‘in some obscure box or (failing that) behind in the wings, from which I can come out at any time without notice’. The desiderated situation resembles that of the ...”

“... in her company, or sneer Your way into some asymptotic baulk. She’s working all out now with Charles Babbage, And that’s a far cry from roast beef and cabbage. It seems they have the plan for a machine To do computing, a thousand sums a minute. This engine has not trundled on the scene Yet, but d’you think there might be something in it? They need a ...”

“... Shaw. It’s not a brilliant contest to win, against the blasé A.B. Walkley, the quasi-mystical Charles Morgan and the appalling James Agate, and personally I’d choose C.E. Montague: but let that go. He was certainly the most entertaining after Shaw, but there I’d say the comparison ends. He lacked the political centre from which Shaw’s jokes ...”

“... William De Morgan’s Life, death and reputation form a curious episode in the history of taste. He died, in 1917, a famous Edwardian novelist, and was almost forgotten. Nearly half a century later he was rediscovered as a great Victorian ceramist. Appropriately, the technique in which he excelled as a potter, lustre, is one that has itself been several times lost, rediscovered and discarded again by different civilisations ...”

“... generation, almost unfathomable. An immense aid to solving many of these problems has come with Charles Edward Lysaght’s new biography. The result of years of dedicated research into public and private archives, and of much valuable testimony from Bracken’s friends and acquaintances, it adds considerably to Andrew Boyle’s study, published in 1974. The ...”

“... original Radio Ballads, a series of radio documentaries made between 1957 and 1964 by the producer Charles Parker and the musicians Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, and broadcast by the BBC. These documentaries interspersed interviews and field recordings with original songs, composed by Seeger and MacColl, which took their lyrics from the words of the ...”

“... Life, Piers Morgan says about being sacked in 2004 as editor of the Mirror, is as serious as you want it to be. Lighten up, he repeatedly tells sad celebrities who complain about his front page exposés that result in their unemployment or divorce. Take it easy, he emails spin doctors and government ministers who fear for their majorities after he has trashed their policies or their love lives to two million readers of the Mirror ...”

“... and, as if in sympathy, historians have moved to reassess the forgotten regimes. Now Kenneth Morgan has written a first-class study of the Lloyd Georgian experiment of 1918-1922. For some time a muffled debate has been in progress about how political history should be interpreted; from the top downwards, or from the grass roots up? Dr ...”

“... to marry his chosen bride. (Sadly, something happened to her.) Five hundred years later, Prince Charles changes the date of his wedding to his chosen bride so as to attend the funeral of the head of the Catholic Church. We can be sure of only one dissimilarity between these two English royals: Henry wasn’t forced into his decision by a fear of the Daily ...”

“... Charles​ Booth’s survey of London poverty was an epic Victorian undertaking. Beginning in the late 1880s with East London, Booth and his army of investigators launched a systematic study which went on to cover nearly all of the metropolis, then the largest in the world with around four million inhabitants. The accounts of their walks around London filled 450 notebooks ...”