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“... familiar truths of national character. The dictionary had been undertaken by the publisher George Smith as a piece of private enterprise, with no official or institutional backing, and it had been brought to completion in record time by a very small staff. Less fortunate nations, in whom the spirit of liberty and energy of ‘character’ had been suppressed ...”

“... Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which ...”

“... punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a Christian. He told my parents, both churchgoing ...”

“... of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was clear to me that ...”

“... Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Denny, Hodgkin, Ayres, Buckley, while his one European was Pol Bury. So Kasmin’s choice was focused on abstraction, with Hockney as the joker in the pack, where Fraser’s was wider, though with an emphasis on Pop. What the two of them had ...”

“... of, such as the new Kensington Central Library. Sometimes they dressed up as Victorians, or as Christopher Wren in a bath chair, and carried a cardboard coffin symbolising the moribund state of affairs. Boty, in costume as a Dresden shepherdess, naturally caught the public eye. Interviewed by the Daily Express in 1959 she pronounced the Air Ministry ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay ...”

“... Now is Clough’s Little-hampton, Clough’s Stevenage and, worse for them both, the death of Christopher, their son. Haslam has this as ‘1945, killed at battle of Monte Cassino’, Jonah Jones as ‘in the protracted and bloody battle of Monte Purgatorio’, no date. In fact it was not so simple. Kitto was ‘missing’ from March 1944, then ...”

“... one of the other trustees, complained that even Keynes’s version was insufficiently sanitised. Christopher Hassall was asked to write the authorised biography in part because, as Nigel Jones notes in his own biography of Brooke, Hassall’s lengthy Life of Eddie Marsh had managed ‘to avoid the topic of his subject’s homosexuality’ and he could ...”

“... into sanctions against Pretoria – which in itself was enough to ensure that action against Smith’s UDI regime would be merely cosmetic. Since all Smith had to do was to keep saying no to any solution acceptable to Commonwealth and world opinion, Wilson’s efforts at personal diplomacy were palpably ...”

“... format in each case. Taped interviews with eight or so concerned onlookers (some of them, like Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Gore Vidal, younger candidates for sagedom) are cut and rearranged to give a chronological sense of each career, but also a whiff of the blood and cordite of intellectual warfare. The purpose is not quite literary biography ...”

“... Fortyish, leather-jacketed, sombre and Northern (‘Lots of planets have a North,’ he says), Christopher Eccleston played the Doctor as a man both hangdog and arrogant, of an age – had he been human – to have been a child when the show was first broadcast, but with a subsequent life that has shown him disappointment, including (a point somewhat ...”

“... I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of improbable adventures, among them (as if in compensation for the Puritan closure of the theatres) the ...”

“... another, it’s unfortunate that their own texts are sometimes careless. You don’t have to be Christopher Ricks to spot that there’s an extra word in the third line of ‘To a Mouse’, or a word missing from line 82 of ‘A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton’. Such glitches are often the result of poor proofreading, and suggest that the Canongate Burns may ...”