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“... proposed digging trenches in the Sahara, filling them with kerosene and setting them ablaze. Charles Cros, a poet and inventor, petitioned the French government to fund the construction of a huge mirror capable of burning messages onto the Martian and Venusian deserts, while the will of Anne Goguet, a French socialite, left 100,000 francs to the ...”

“... but Faraday’s letters teem with erotemes and interrogations. (Many of the question marks are Frank James’s editorial insertions: Faraday tended to overlook them in his haste to move on to the next inquiry.) Faraday asks, and is asked in turn, by Oxford gentleman-geologists and provincial glassworks clerks, by crown princes and loving nieces. He admits ...”

“... wasn’t just a symbol of empire but was actually built on the proceeds of slavery. In 1660, Charles II had incorporated the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa. Its charter gave the company possession of coastal West Africa from Cape Blanco, at the northern end of what is now Mauritania, to the Cape of Good Hope, ‘for a period of one ...”

“... at all? The question gets more and more intriguing as the new film unfolds. The old man is Frank Sheeran, a real-life gangster who died in 2003 at the age of 83. He worked for the mob in Philadelphia and was very close to Jimmy Hoffa, the more than charismatic leader of the Teamsters’ Union. Sheeran had been in prison for what he regarded as one of ...”

“... by the use of newly developed firearms; Rome was sacked by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, in 1527.Many of the Jews who lived around the Mediterranean were on the move, and not by choice. Those who hadn’t converted to Christianity were expelled from the domains of the Spanish crown in 1492, and from the kingdom of Portugal in 1497. The ...”

“... and local prison systems are separate. After Vietnam, they no longer trust the natives.) In 1963 Frank Walton, the director of USAID’s Public Safety Program, signed an order at one Vietnamese prison that detainees be ‘isolated from all others for months at a time’ and be subject to ‘immobilisation – the prisoner is bolted to the floor, handcuffed ...”

“... routine question on ‘just cause and impediment’. And those equally ‘literary’ figures of Charles and Di, the gallant prince leading his innocent young bride to the altar, provide an image of romance that still manages to support even the cheapest shotgun wedding. Surprisingly, Rubinstein found no place in her anthology for this royal epitome of ...”

“... Two political forces​ dominated post-Liberation France: Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French and head of the provisional French government until January 1946; and the French Communist Party (PCF), at that point the biggest and most popular party in the country. As Robert Gildea explains in his perceptive new book, each constructed a myth about France’s behaviour during the war that served its own political interests; each claimed it had led the Resistance ...”

“... scarcely male. Surely this must be the cow of Guernica’s bull. It seemed as mystical and as dire.Charles Harrison, who quotes these lines in his excellent English Art and Modernism, immediately cautions us against reading Nash’s painting in the light of his prose. ‘As a writer,’ Harrison says, ‘Nash was given to whimsy and to an exaggerated ...”

“... Frank Kermode observed in a recent article that critics are always being needed to rediscover work that, for whatever reason, has gone silent. Good literature is more silent than one might suppose: it waits mutely on the shelves, it cannot attract attention to itself, and in the conditions of our own or any other time it could wait till judgment day without being found and proclaimed ...”

“... the manifesto itself is printed on manila paper. This visual and verbal punning puts me in mind of Frank O’Connor’s account of a picture he saw in Joyce’s Paris flat: the city of Cork in a cork frame. An instance, no doubt, of Joyce’s compulsive punning, the picture can also be viewed as the manifestation of an ambiguous attitude. The visual pun ...”

“... at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men everywhere. In a public lavatory in Hyde Park, he picks up, in a quite different sense, an elderly man who has collapsed at the urinal. This is ...”

“... language is an enlightened and idealistic concept, and it informs the Clark Lectures which Charles Tomlinson delivered in Dryden’s old college, Trinity, Cambridge, in 1982. Tomlinson is an enthusiastic admirer of Dryden, whom he terms ‘the Poundian figure of his age’, and he also speaks inspiringly of the ‘unity of European culture’. His ...”

“... derives from the metonym that Luke Fildes devised in 1870 when he represented the death of Charles Dickens by picturing his vacant armchair. Van Gogh’s taste for swingeing, all-confronting symbols would come to fruition in his solar discs and sunflowers. The exhibition demonstrates that while his handiwork may alter, Van Gogh’s will to perorate ...”

“... and stony uplands as wholly entangled in human life, not as weird lunar nowherelands. In 1681 Charles Cotton dismissed them as ‘Nature’s pudenda’; in 1775 Dr Johnson was ‘astonished and repelled’ by their ‘wide extent of hopeless sterility’ (though he at least had the hardihood to go and see them for himself); in 1826 Noel Thomas Carrington ...”