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“... on which colourful, emotive 19th-century writers such as Carlyle loved to draw. As Conor Cruise O’Brien observed, the spectre haunting Europe in the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto ‘walks for the first time in the pages of Burke’. Burke’s early opponents, English radicals such as Tom Paine and Mary Shelley’s parents William Godwin and ...”

“... warn’. The Hunterian Museum in London used to exhibit the skeleton of the Irish giant Charles Byrne, whose fate inspired Hilary Mantel to write a fine novel, The Giant, O’Brien, which examines the surgeon John Hunter’s avid pursuit of specimen bodies to study, the more unusual the more covetable. At the ...”

“... look up. Her bowed back looked narrow and virginal; Eleanor half-laughed elatedly.In ‘Joining Charles’, from the third collection, Charles’s disenchanted young wife stays with her husband’s mother and sisters before setting off to meet him in their new home in France. She falls in love with the women’s gentle ...”

“... story itself becomes part of the process of surviving. One of the purest examples of this is Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Man I Killed’, a preternaturally lucid description of a young Vietnamese soldier blown up by the narrator’s grenade. O’Brien’s precise, almost entranced detailing of the star-shaped hole where one ...”

“... furious at a review by Vidal in the New York Review of Books that linked him and Henry Miller to Charles Manson (‘The Miller-Mailer-Manson man, or M3 for short, has been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’), decided to take his gripe to the source. It was evident that there would ...”

“... become a patron of Oriental learning, overseeing important translations of works on Hindu law and Charles Wilkins’s pioneering translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. When Sir William Jones, the inspirational instigator of Indo-European studies, arrived in Bengal as a judge, Hastings was one of his strongest supporters. Though it has long been fashionable to ...”

“... the enslavement of black people. Equiano agreed in 1775 to accompany the scientist and businessman Charles Irving on a colonisation venture. Irving was well aware of Equiano’s adaptability: they had originally met in a Haymarket barber’s shop, and Irving had been impressed enough to recruit him as a scientific assistant on his voyage towards the North Pole ...”

“... young Lord Stafford and Lady G. were eventually acted out in full view of the tabloids by Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. James knew a dramatic subject. In some contemporary writing about lone, long-suffering and much-photographed female celebrities who have haunted our dreams, there is an attempt to compare them to figures from Greek tragedy. In ...”

“... F.S.L. Lyons, doyen of historians of modern Ireland, when faced 27 years ago with a short life of Charles Stewart Parnell which took implicit but cheeky issue with his own magnum opus on the Chief. The young Bew – Belfast-born and a graduate of People’s Democracy marches as well as of the Cambridge history faculty – had already published a radical ...”

“... or bad, clever or stupid? Stendhal asks himself in the summer of 1832 is the opening of a poem by Charles Boyle. Wet from the shower    towelling your breasts you ask me if I’ve read    Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic goes Michael Hulse’s poem ‘Fornicating and Reading the Papers’. Meanwhile, Didsbury has ‘The sky is like an entry in ...”

“... which recently afflicted the six counties still under British rule (the ‘sick counties’, Flann O’Brien called them) also brought the world’s attention to bear on the island as a whole. Devastated in the 19th century by a famine in which British bungling and indifference played a considerable part, a sizeable segment of the Irish population was ...”

“... interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children ...”

“... abuses. The reference is to the George Cukor film of the Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight, in which Charles Boyer drives Ingrid Bergman mad with self-doubt through devious manipulations that include the gradual damping-down of the gaslight lamps in their marital home. Use of the accusation might tend to exculpate the accused, since anyone capable of applying it ...”

“... ago. ‘In suburban homes of the late 1950s within commuting distance of Manhattan,’ Geoffrey O’Brien wrote in the NYRB in 2019, ‘it was not unusual to come upon a paperback copy of Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century.’ In suburban London homes in the early 1960s it was very unusual indeed. Hecht said he had managed to ‘anger the whole of Great ...”

“... Wisely, D’Antonio refrains from offering an estimate of Trump’s net worth. When Timothy O’Brien, a New York Times journalist, suggested in Trump Nation (2005) that Trump probably wasn’t a billionaire at all, he was sued for libel. The case was eventually thrown out, as Trump must have known it would be, but ...”