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“... East Africa in 1911: excited for the kill, he galloped too near his prey, missed and was mauled. Charles, having lost an arm and won an MC in the First World War, was felled by an angry buffalo in Tanganyika in 1928. Grey’s remaining brother, Alexander, a vicar in Trinidad, died aged 44, probably from the after-effects of a childhood cricket ...”

“... first place. In the film he is very sympathetically played by David Calder: this may be truer to Charles Wood’s screenplay than to life. There is no hint in this portrayal of the boorishness which never seems far from the surface of his own account. His wife, Jean Lawrence, is a shadowy presence in both book and film. She is a senior lecturer at ...”

“... as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and 16 furze bushes’. A century later the design for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the ...”

“... misanthropy, Inadmissible Evidence, or for that matter, Alpha Beta by Ted Whitehead, Veterans by Charles Wood, The Arbour by Andrea Dunbar, or Caryl Churchill’s plays directed by Max Stafford-Clark, or the plays of Christopher Hampton, Joe Orton, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Athol Fugard or Sam Shepard. The tradition of unmannered acting, devotion to ...”

“... novel – about a summer holiday he spent when he was 11 – as an adult book. But his publisher, Charles Darke, insists that it is a children’s book, that children will read it and understand that childhood is finite: ‘that it won’t last, it can’t last, that sooner or later they’re finished, done for, that their childhood is not for ever.’ ...”

“... in motion, purgatory is open for those of us holding a carving knife, a rope, and a hoop made of wood. Regarding Walking on Water I’m trying to walk on water, and you know, at times, somehow, I manage to do so. Believe me, the trick is to fix on something else besides one’s own gravity. And so, here I am teaching others to walk on water. They wet the ...”

“... of the war, by occupying the area before the Allies did. This own-goal-that-almost-was inspired Charles Cholmondeley, an eccentric RAF flight lieutenant seconded to MI5, to propose sending another corpse to Spain with papers that the Spanish would show to the Germans. Cholmondeley was secretary to the Twenty Committee, which ran double agents and whose ...”

“... or rather the key doesn’t have to do with persons, but with stereotypes. Minnelli and his writer Charles Schnee have carefully anticipated not what we might know about Hollywood filmmaking but what we may imagine Hollywood figures ought to be like. This is all very intelligent and knowing, but also a little chaotic, because our imaginations foster various ...”

“... to think it was – and the shallows of the human heart are a great subject. In Madame de . . . Charles Boyer explains to his wife, in the lucid, pompous and intimately vulnerable manner that Ophuls keeps lending to his older men – the betrayed (and then philandering) husband in La Ronde, played by Fernand Gravey, talks in just the same way – that their ...”

“... There was once​ a time when, in the eyes of advanced American taste-makers, Grant Wood led the list of home-grown artists who ought to be dismissed. Clement Greenberg, for example, used his column in the Nation to make it clear that nothing by Wood and his fellow figurative painters, not even their most successful compositions, was anything like as interesting as an unsuccessful picture by an average abstractionist ...”

“... version of caro, which was the Italian for expensive. Of course, the English for Carlo was Charles, which was the name of his estate-agent friend. That was a coincidence. Maybe Charles too was Massively VWE [Very Well Endowed]. It was hard to tell with those expansive pin-stripes. How would he put it? – ‘enjoys a ...”

“... were mainly small, sometimes printed in red and black, though more often reproduced from colour wood engravings; some were traditional tales for children, some were by living writers; the texts were set close, often within flowery borders, the engravings ranged from peasant children in his first book, The Queen of the Fishes, to Italianate girls in long ...”

“... doesn’t get beyond a projection of self-pity. It’s sad and sloppy, but in part redeemed by Charles Dance’s performance as Hearst. He sits smiling grimly through Mank’s whole recital as, one by one, the guests, including Davies and Mayer, get up and leave. Then Hearst calmly escorts Mank to the door.Mank finishes his script, and Houseman collects ...”

“... when Jones embarked at Southampton, to the following summer, the last part unfolding in Mametz Wood where, on 10 July, more than a week into the Battle of the Somme, he and his comrades in the Royal Welch Fusiliers were finally committed (they had relieved Siegfried Sassoon’s battalion on 5 July). Once the attack on the ...”

“... and paid little regard to changes in the economic, social and cultural landscape. Maldwyn Jones, Charles Tindall and Hugh Brogan have played absolutely safe and settled for an orthodox approach. They neither dispute nor deviate significantly from the well-trodden paths of traditional historiography. If Professors Jones and Tindall are to be criticised, it is ...”