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“... Danish or Norwegian race’, hard-working and enterprising and therefore not short of food. Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant placed in charge of Irish famine relief, now turned his attention to Scotland, where he co-founded and chaired the Highland and Island Emigration society, which between 1851 and 1856 helped five thousand people to move ...”

“... cartel. Cecil and Belloc took particular exception to the Liberal politician and journalist Charles Masterman, an old friend of the Chesterton family, and characterised his marriage to Lucy Lyttleton (the Liberal-voting daughter of the Tory chief of the general staff and a childhood friend of Frances Chesterton) as the act of an insecure and ...”

“... on the shutter and it is thrown open, light floods in, there is the sudden roar of the crowd. Charles I steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on ...”

“... books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of any other universities or places of higher ...”

“... Literature in Transition, plenty of Irish fiction deals sympathetically with ‘Imperial Minds’. Charles Lever’s novels about India, for instance, are alive with adventure, failure and ‘the underlying contradictions of empire – that the British Empire was not, in fact, “British”’. Shanahan might have mentioned that Reginald Dyer, the commanding ...”

“... as is suggested by the above-cited cases of Mary Toft (1703-63, ‘the rabbit-breeder’) and Sir Charles Isham (1819-1903, ‘rural improver and gardener’). The ODNB’s greater inclusiveness is one of the ways it differs not just from its predecessor but also from Who’s Who, often regarded in the 20th century as the ante-chamber to the DNB. In that ...”

“... so darkly as to make it unsurprising that Mack twice calls it ‘teasing’. The poet’s friend Charles Jervas painted it, probably in 1717, when Pope – aged 29 – was deep in his translation of Homer, a lengthy task that not only sealed his fame as the country’s leading poet (he was admired by good judges when still under twenty) but secured him the ...”

“... of the group. In August 1876, when he was 21, he wrote to William Ward about their contemporary Charles Todd, later chaplain to the Royal Navy: ‘In our friend Todd’s ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver? Last night I strolled into the theatre about ten o’clock and to my surprise saw Todd and young Ward the quire boy in a private ...”

“... later, was in America with his wife, Georgiana, trying to make his fortune; his dearest friend, Charles Armitage Brown, was on a summer walking tour, having frugally rented out the house he had been sharing with Keats since Tom’s death nearly two years before. No one would come with Keats to the warm climate his doctors prescribed. Keats’s friends had ...”

“... about the ‘great insanity’ without Levi than to think deeply about 19th-century London without Dickens or 19th-century Paris without Balzac or Baudelaire. That said, Levi’s claims for his subject are, relatively speaking, modest. In his writing much of what we take to be the uniqueness of the ‘Holocaust’, the essence of its ...”

“... to do a fair amount of that.You weren’t encouraged, as we were, to go in for little whimsical Charles Lamb-like essays? Writing trivia about trivia?No. The senior English master was a raging Leavisite, an absolute caricature.Had he been to Cambridge?No, he’d been to Southampton and had been thoroughly instructed there by a sub-Leavisite. At that ...”

“... sort because, up till then, any book that captured my interest, such as a novel by Scott or Dickens, or by Kingsley or Harrison Ainsworth, or even by the much despised and now completely forgotten Jeffrey Farnol, whose daintiness deeply offended me, I would pick up, and starting on page 1, I would race through it as fast as my eyes could carry me, until ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be there. The lawyers were headed by Stephens, an ebullient, red-faced mucker straight out of Dickens, saturated in media savvy. He stood among the sureties and supporters: Tony Benn, Jemima Khan, Bianca Jagger, James Fox and Bella Freud, and the five or so young people I associated with WikiLeaks. We were led up to seats in the gallery they’d saved for ...”

“... enough, in the folkloric atmosphere of this particular story, to turn him into a villain out of Dickens: Ralph Nickleby with bells on. If Feilding-Mellen hadn’t existed, they would have had to invent him, curly hair and country seat included. In the end, they invented him even so, and said of him what they wanted to say. Out of the cardboard cut-outs and ...”