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“... appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English department’s outer office, in sight of the faculty mailboxes, the morning after Howe’s review reached subscribers in Colorado. A ...”

“... who were more interested in eating than talking and who thus presented less of a social peril. Charles Boyer, for example, who was appearing next door to us on 45th Street in Rattigan’s Man and Boy. With Leslie Howard he had been a particular heart-throb of Mam’s. Now, napkin tucked under his chin and in that all too imitable accent in which he’d ...”

“... to him to show some interest in ‘the man’ who was struggling with his wife, to express some hope that the Police might apprehend him in the next few days, or to add some detail about the incredible circumstances – anything to prove his innocence and keep in touch with his children. It needed only a couple of words. But he can’t tell the story. A ...”

“... That Friday, when the announcer said the Agreement had been signed, I felt a sort of cold hope: I remembered Sunningdale, the Loyalist Workers’ Strike, the collapse of the Power-Sharing Executive in 1974. At seven that evening, we reached the house of the friend we were staying with on Lough Swilly. Looking at the hail sweeping down the darkening ...”

“... clear. Watergate fans will recognise the old cast of characters, those almost-forgotten names – Charles Colson, David Young, Egil ‘Bud’ Krogh – and there is pleasure in this: a bit like watching an old horror film on late-night TV. Yet on that level Mr Hersh is not exciting. We know the Watergate story from every angle and, by now, from the memoirs of ...”

“... of politics likely to have appealed to the most heroic figure in Irish life and literature since Charles Stewart Parnell: politics, that is, proposing a parade of rascality, hilarity, treachery, hypocrisy, audacity, idealism, always shot through by moments of splendid courage and always ending in bitter tears? If Dear Reader will allow me to vanish for three ...”

“... took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated Baxter’s useful skill with ...”

“... out of big business, to rest at the English country home of an American friend. The friend was one Charles de Forest, another Grotonian. At the house, ‘Fuzzy’ met Charles’s sister Alice. They eventually returned together to America, and married in May 1929. By this time ‘Fuzzy’ was already seeing John ...”

“... metropolis with corruption. Even Spanish theorists, Pagden points out, came to argue that the only hope for their Empire lay in economic reform. By the end of the 18th century, all three empires stressed commerce and were ‘overwhelmingly concerned with undoing the deleterious consequences of the “spirit of conquest” and the military ethos of ...”

“... to a know-nothing government in Westminster. The Sydney Herald warned off Gipps with a reminder of Charles I’s fate. Somewhere in all this an independent Australian nation was evolving, but at what cost? Gipps was forced to condone the whitewashing of the Waterloo Creek massacre. The remaining suspects in the Myall Creek massacre got off. The Governor’s ...”

“... material. Respectable (if more sedate) life as historical documents, to be studied in the hope that the informed mind will be able to persuade them to flutter with their old vivacity. Painting apart, she is clearly interesting, from our point of view, as a woman who was successful in a male profession. Her contemporaries were kinder than critics are ...”

“... was born in June 1948, which makes him the same age as Ian McEwan and a few months older than King Charles. Like McEwan, he spent his earliest years in Tripoli – his father, like McEwan’s, was posted there as a British army officer – and was sent back aged eleven to an England still shaped by the war, for a boarding school education at the hands of ...”

“... published a translation of French fairy tales of the 17th and 18th centuries, the bulk of them by Charles Perrault, with others by Mme D’Aulnoy and Mme Leprince. The collection included ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ and ‘Puss in Boots’. This was a change of direction for ...”

“... as a Zouave when the war began, was killed in one of the several futile battles fought in the hope of breaking the Paris siege. He was 28. Renoir was conscripted and sent to the Pyrenees, where he got dysentery and nearly died. Monet, who had done a tour in the army in the early 1860s, was called up, but absconded to England. Zola stayed in Paris (he ...”

“... a familiar face at the casino. Guillaume, meanwhile, was enrolled in the exclusive Collège Saint-Charles, where he did well, winning numerous prizes. Apollinaire probably picked up from Walt Whitman his habit of naming himself in his poems: ‘Je me disais Guillaume il est temps que tu viennes’ (‘I said to myself Guillaume it is time that you ...”