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“... as to short-circuit embarrassment. It now forms an exact counterpart of the alliance between Fox News and the Republican Party. The slack habits induced by such an understanding, the easy pressing out of inconvenient facts, has compromised the independence and weakened the deliberative powers of the Democratic Party. It was a misjudged conceit of ...”

“... oneiric subterranean logic of Britishness, not against continuity, permanence, wigs, Mr Speaker, fox-hunting, the Commonwealth or sovereignty either. Yet it is in the nature of taboos to be broken: they are founded on custom and tradition, not democracy. In the UK they were a substitute for democracy as well as nationalism. Once smashed up by the Thatcherite ...”

“... Paul developed into a lively and effective writer and propagandist for Marxism in France.) To Charles Longuet, trying to earn an exile’s pittance by teaching French in Oxford before their marriage, she sent words of commiseration: ‘This small world of English university men and professorial shopkeepers must indeed be hopelessly dull.’ Laura at 21 ...”

“... warm or amusing story from their 43 years of marriage. One commentator has compared him to Prince Charles at a welcoming ceremony in New Guinea: he maintains a fixed half-smile, but has no idea what the natives are getting excited about. Americans value sincerity, above all, in their presidential candidates, regardless of opinions on specific ...”

“... slide into dotage, unsparingly described by Malcolm Muggeridge and Evelyn Waugh (‘Smell like fox’). He died in his Sussex home in 1953. Belloc was sometimes taxed with being the author of W.N. Ewer’s much anthologised squib: ‘How odd/Of God/To choose/The Jews.’ As a young man he had maintained Dreyfus guilty against all the evidence to the ...”

“... consort, Edith Swan-Neck, mother of his children. This piece, by the Anglo-German sculptor Charles Augustus William Wilke, was banished from the grounds of Hastings Museum to a corner of the West Marina Gardens in St Leonards-on-Sea adequate to its transcendent obscurity. The decaying low-baroque tableau of conjugal tenderness, features eaten away by ...”

“... the ways in which reworkings of the legend were openly politicised during the Interregnum, so that Charles II’s escape after the Battle of Worcester could be celebrated in a Cavalier ballad called ‘Robin Whood Revived’, while in a play entitled Robin Hood and His Crew of Soldiers (1661) the citizens of Nottingham would make the outlaws’ surrender to ...”

“... of America’s medical apartheid, are dying at an alarming rate; the New York Times columnist Charles Blow has described the virus as a ‘brother killer’. The fact that it has struck the United States with such shattering force is evidence not only of the denial, mismanagement and sheer amateurishness with which the Trump administration has responded ...”

“... particular with the regime of Mary of Hungary, who was regent in the Netherlands for her brother Charles V. His ability to connect the various circles in which he moved – politics, finance, commerce, religion and kin – renders his life worthy of consideration.Much of Vaughan’s time seems to have been burdened with other people’s shopping lists. He ...”

“... the enslavement of black people. Equiano agreed in 1775 to accompany the scientist and businessman Charles Irving on a colonisation venture. Irving was well aware of Equiano’s adaptability: they had originally met in a Haymarket barber’s shop, and Irving had been impressed enough to recruit him as a scientific assistant on his voyage towards the North Pole ...”

“... education. Oxbridge in the 1840s was not without its Germanising tendencies, however, while Charles Bell, who was Owen’s predecessor as Hunterian Professor, was both an Edinburgh man and an ardent Paleyan (contributor, in fact, to the Bridgewater Treatises), as was that archetypal new man and adoptive Londoner, hardly a reassuring figure to the landed ...”

“... built around the disappearances of Klara von Acht, daughter of Alois von Acht, and of the crown of Charles V. The girl and her friends die or go missing when they rashly walk out to meet their Russian liberators; the crown cannot be found in its proper place among art treasures stored in a salt-mine. These mysteries, although well enough sustained, at first ...”

“... tribe. Imelda Marcos visited and declared herself a changed person; so did Gina Lollobrigida and Charles Lindbergh. National Geographic came and went twice. Everyone who visited the Tasaday was ravished by the remote setting and touched by the group’s affectionate spontaneity. For their part the Tasaday became deeply attached to John Nance and positively ...”

“... I read or reread two hundred or so by other writers to provide context. In 1957, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft described reading detective stories as ‘in a way the opposite of having psychoanalytic treatment. The motive underlying one is to deny insight and underlying the other is to gain it.’ This might be true of the characters inside the books, but ...”

“... of Austria. That is, he was named after, or had usurped and was allowed the name of, the son of Charles V and victor of the battle of Lepanto – the short-lived, but symbolically important, sea victory of Spain over Islam two generations earlier. He was a fool called Don Juan of Austria. ‘The Jester Named Don Juan of Austria’ (1633) What did it ...”