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“... to a famous attack on him by Helen Gardner. It was a bizarre episode. Gardner, invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures for 1979-80, described in them how for ten years she had been preoccupied with professorial duties and close textual editing and had only recently felt free to take a look around at what had been happening in English studies ...”

“... in a review by Kingsley, Ricks notices the witty conflation of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the King Charles spaniel in I ix – but others are of real significance. Ricks doesn’t cite Tennyson’s revealing comment that the narrator’s belief in the innate patriotism of the commercial classes (‘For I trust if an enemy’s fleet came yonder round by the ...”

“... from her insistence on writing prose rather than poetry. Acker’s debt to Black Mountain – to Charles Olson, in particular, whose work she had known since she was still a schoolgirl – is quite clear and it is strange that this should have gone unrecognised, at least as she saw it, because she was not considered to be a poet. She adapted his concern with ...”

“... DDT in the wake of a campaign to control mosquitoes. The observations of the bald eagle enthusiast Charles Broley, who observed the precipitous decline of eagle populations in Florida, proved as worthy of her attention as those of scientists in cutting-edge research labs. Gathering together far-flung studies as well as reports from local birdwatchers, sport ...”

“... to have drowned himself. In his fifties Gray fell for a Swiss aristocrat in his early twenties, Charles Victor de Bonstetten. Bonstetten stayed in rooms in Pembroke College for three months, was introduced to Gray’s academic friends and spent the days reading Milton, Shakespeare and selections of natural history with the poet. In some way Gray was clearly ...”

“... an informer? The question has exercised her biographers. They all agree that the collaborator was Charles Delval, executed in January 1945. But from then on they differ. Jean Vallier, author of the massive two-volume C’était Marguerite Duras, dismisses the story as her invention. But his argument is unconvincing: he writes that she was so short that she ...”

“... sent tamed exotic birds back to Europe as precious gifts. In 1518, Alonso de Zuazo sent Emperor Charles V parrots, turkeys, hawks and falcons. In 1525, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo sent the emperor ‘thirty or more parrots’, most of which ‘could speak very well’. They didn’t just send birds: in 1528, Hernán Cortés arranged the delivery of a ...”

“... and forging links with various Resistance groups: communists, Zionists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle. Over the course of the war, the 6th helped to save as many as ten thousand Jews from deportation. Shatz GalleryOnly four people worked in the lab. The director was a man known as Loutre (‘Otter’). Kaminsky’s assistants, the Schidlof ...”

“... with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be Larkin to Kingsley Amis, and it’s a nice sting in the tail that we can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s ...”

“... she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became admirals, served on at least ten naval sodomy trials between them, eight of these before Mansfield Park was published. And she wasn’t too delicate to risk such an allusion. Many years after Austen’s death, her favourite ...”

“... sense of a complex and bewildering history. But it does have some point if taken to suggest the passage from a structuralist hankering for system to a broadly post-structuralist insistence that language must always exceed or elude the grasp of any such methodical enterprise.This shift came about under pressure from various quarters. It was prompted partly ...”

“... the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age ...”

“... on the first chapter. Violence was never Fanon’s remedy for the Third World; it was a rite of passage for colonised communities and individuals who had become mentally ill, in his view, as a result of the settler-colonial project, itself saturated with violence and racism. Like Walter Benjamin, Fanon believed that for the oppressed, the ‘“state of ...”

“... by Michael Winner in 1978. Humphrey Bogart’s momentum, his Jacobean wit, is transformed by the passage of time into Robert Mitchum’s monumental disdain. Mitchum is breathless, sculptural. He moves with extreme reluctance, as if charging an excess tariff for every step. Sallis understands how it’s done, he’s been to the classes. He’s learnt how to ...”

“... Darker jokes, which do have to do with the appetite for violence, flicker around memories of Charles Manson. Mickey worries that his TV ratings are lower than those for a Manson programme, but consoles himself: ‘Yeah, it’s pretty hard to beat the king.’ A group of interviewees for the TV show, identified in the screenplay simply as ‘three ...”