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“... on a sexual sense of merry that was standard early modern slang. (Rochester famously wrote of Charles II, with no implication that the king was cheerful: ‘Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,/A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.’) Curll’s obscene publication, flogging a single schoolboy joke to ...”

“... Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, whose biblical characters stand for identifiable Englishmen (King David is Charles II, Absalom Monmouth, Achitophel Shaftesbury, and so on); but like Dryden, Milton creates an Old Testament setting evocative of the English political landscape, and, like Dryden’s, Milton’s political ...”

“... fitting.’ A ready-made Pop Art collage, it consecrated absolute celebrity, the President and the King. The presidency, Norman Mailer observed during Nixon’s 1972 bid for re-election, is ‘a primitive office and inspires the tribes of America to pick up the modes and manners of their chief’. Two genres that thrived under the Nixon presidency were the ...”

“... credit for the outcome. With the Armistice in place, he returned home to receive the accolades of king and country. Elevated to a peerage, he became Earl Haig of Bemersyde. Then with almost unseemly haste, he was eased into oblivion. In the war’s aftermath, Winston Churchill wrote, Haig ‘was given no work. He did not join in the counsels of the nation; he ...”

“... their son. The séances were so successful that her fiancé’s father, a French general, invited Charles Richet, a professor of physiology at the Sorbonne who was well known for his interest in psychic matters, to attend them; Richet soon declared himself fully persuaded that Béraud was genuine. Not long afterwards, Marthe Béraud confessed to trickery. She ...”

“... was completely off the map.’ He sinks into the comforts of a less inscrutable world: that of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. The comic strip, read by millions of Americans, is the centre of Franzen’s childhood imaginative life: ‘Like most of the nation’s ten-year-olds, I had a private, intense relationship with Snoopy, the cartoon beagle. He was a ...”

“... in support of this definition seem to tell a different story. They include a letter of 1829 by Charles Lamb, in which he speaks of ‘true broad Hogarthian fun’, and an essay by Carlyle of 1837: ‘There is nothing more Hogarthian comic.’ Next comes Swinburne, fifty years later, speaking of ‘an excellent Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid ...”

“... terms of the treaties of 1884 and 1908 France had a pre-emptive right to the Congo if the Belgian king surrendered his. The Congolese disagreed. France backed Moïse Tshombe’s breakaway state of Katanga in the Congo against the UN, and it strongly supported Biafra in the hope of breaking up Nigeria, the dominant Anglophone state in West Africa. Sometimes ...”

“... to settle on whether to speak to him from inside or outside his own voice. In his ‘Tomb of Charles Baudelaire’, Mallarmé called his predecessor a ‘poison tutélaire/Toujours à respirer si nous en périssons’ (‘a tutelary poison/we breathe always though we die of it’). It’s a neat way of imagining the powerful poet as the air we ...”

“... She was arrested a week later in Philadelphia for ‘inciting to riot’ by Detective-Sergeant Charles Jacobs, who, on the train back to New York, offered to drop the charges if she informed on her comrades; she threw a glass of cold water in his face. The judge described her as a ‘dangerous woman’ and sentenced her to a year at Blackwell’s Island ...”

“... Max Palevsky and Malick himself. It was based on the story of a Nebraska hoodlum called Charles Starkweather (Martin Sheen), who in 1957 killed the father of 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate (Sissy Spacek, 23 at the time), and then took off with her on the lam across the desolate spaces of legend.Badlands drew on movies like Gun Crazy and Bonnie and ...”

“... and retaining power. There has been something called a Tory Party in England since the reign of Charles II, and though one would be hard put to find much resemblance between the ‘Church and King’ Tories and the rabble who contested the leadership of the Conservative Party last year, it is without question the most ...”

“... broad-bottomed merchant vessel reconfigured by the navy as an armed freighter. It was named after Charles Wager, the first lord of the Admiralty and mastermind of the secret mission. In May 1741, having already lost dozens of its crew to disease, the Wager ran aground in the fearsome seas off the coast of Chile. Of the ship’s original complement of around ...”

“... their loyalties to the Labour Party, among them the future cabinet ministers Arthur Ponsonby and Charles Trevelyan. Second, the hounding MacDonald experienced gave him a new credibility with the left of the ILP, for whom he became a figurehead. And he did flirt with a more radical stance. He welcomed the February Revolution in Russia, and appeared, later in ...”

“... seeking support for the Civil Rights movement in the South and in particular for Martin Luther King. The text deplored what the Police and other elements of the then dominant white segregationist forces in the South had done to peaceful protesters against racial discrimination. It said that Dr King had been arrested ...”