“... the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”

“... find the best.’ You are always alone with the oddness of modern consumption. Walking under the white lights of Sainsbury’s you find out just who you are. The reams of cartons, the pyramids of tins: there they stand on the miles of shelves, the story of how we live now. Cereal boxes look out at you with their breakfast-ready smiles, containing flakes of ...”

“... 1890s to 1940. It was written over the course of four years but reads as if it had been done in white heat over six weeks; each written page represents the compression of a thousand pages read. The moral pressure is extraordinary: with just a few happy exceptions, the story of each writer is told as a miniature tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a ...”

“... to fall within Article 2. The killing has given rise to the current inquiry by the retired judge William Gage, whose report is likely to deal in detail with multiple allegations of abuse of detainees by British forces in Iraq. When the ECHR came into force in the 1950s, it was exactly such abuses of detainees in foreign countries that dogged the ...”

“... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a ...”

“... Thomas Beecham: the gentleman-conductors held sway, stiff and upholstered on the podium, their white moustaches like frozen waterfalls, their batons cocked like riding crops. Elgar famously told the teenaged Yehudi Menuhin, who was about to record his Violin Concerto under the composer’s direction, not to worry about rehearsing – he was off to the ...”

“... in his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, written 17 years later, that his ‘whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at’. The horror of what happened that day sank in immediately. Gerard Wathen, the principal of Khalsa College, who had intervened to stem the street violence of two days earlier, told Dyer ...”

“... didn’t deter Teruzzi from making an impulsive visit to Varese, where Lilliana was rehearsing for William Tell, and proposing to her. She rebuffed him: ‘Please, I think of you as a friend.’ He left, furious.It would be nice to imagine that this cultured American had woken up to the unpleasantness of her suitor’s politics, but that wasn’t, alas, the ...”

“... of his work; Outcast London began with a survey of British economic thought from David Ricardo to William Stanley Jevons. Now, Stedman Jones’s commitment to the constitutive power of language propelled him down a path that eventually led to a tamed version of social democracy. In An End to Poverty (2004), he sought to recover a lost critical tradition that ...”

“... shows how distant visual phenomena can be described in close physical terms: The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn becomes One cold metallic grain is quivering still Deep in the flood of warm ethereal fluid. The fact that a blind poet could make the translation suggests that the problem was not one of ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... future by calling upon familiar dreams about the past, how closely they confine personal liberty. (William Morris is often cited as an exception in this last respect. But in his conviction that men do not really desire what they imagine themselves to want there is already the seeds of authoritarianism.) Ought we to regret, with the Manuels, the disappearance ...”

“... a hand upon them and would have been indignant if anyone had made the familiar imputation – as William Cory and Oscar Browning were at Eton when their open interest in good looks was rewarded by the headmaster’s request that they resign from the staff. Benson published Cory’s poems and translations (‘They told me, Heraclitus’), which, together with ...”

“... the unity of the English Church). Spenser belonged, as Shakespeare did, to the period in which William Camden was at work providing etymologies for many names, and that is part of the reason he was so alive to the resources and buried senses of nomenclature. Writers in the 19th and 20th centuries could scour newspapers (and in Dickens’s case council ...”