“... scheme, which, as he remarks, does not work well for the later part of life. But, as our masters are prone to ask these days, what is the utility and social significance of this project? As Burrow says, the various schemes give no good answers to someone who wants to know, for instance, at what age one became an adult. The schemes are traditional and ...”

“... recent novel deals with one of the most fraught subjects in US history: the long march of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War. The election of 1864 was a referendum on whether the Union should fight to achieve total victory or seek a negotiated peace, which would almost certainly have required the Union to rescind its ...”

“... on the American literary scene were anti-Stalinist socialists who defended Trotsky. In 1937 William Philips and Philip Rahv had revived Partisan Review as a left-wing anti-Stalinist literary journal. The Committee for Cultural Freedom was founded in 1939 by the philosophers John Dewey and Sidney Hook with a similar programme. Lionel Trilling, James ...”

“... expect from the author of Plateforme (2001), and a less expected enthusiasm for the writings of William Morris – becomes the victim of an extravagantly gruesome murder. The Map and the Territory therefore carries out a kind of double self-annihilation: the imagined slaying of the writer called ‘Houellebecq’, and the aesthetic triumph of an artist ...”

“... coveted and every altar required for consecration was treasure. Rulers cast their greedy eyes, as William of Malmesbury wrote in the 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or ...”

“... more than a page to the paramilitary group Tara, best-known for the links between its founder, William McGrath, and the notorious Kincora child abuse scandal. Although Tara has not been held responsible for terrorist outrages, many of the people who later became key figures in both the UDA and the UVF began their paramilitary careers there. The ...”

“... Spitting Image to present her forty years later as a gin-swilling commoner. Since then death and William Shawcross have done little to humanise her. His biography was pious to a degree and, like his equally fulsome edition of her letters, much too long.* Despite all of which a personality, powerful and in some ways admirable and unusual, manages to break ...”

“... methods of enquiry would allow at least some people to find out things for themselves. It was, William Harvey wrote, ‘base’ to ‘receive instructions from others’ comments without examination of the objects themselves, especially as the book of Nature lies so open and is so easy of consultation’. ‘Easy’, though, is the word we use to describe ...”

“... the circumstances, unavoidable.The Smiths were a family of significance. Bodichon’s grandfather William inherited a great wholesale grocery business, and in the 1780s and 1790s bought himself social and political status. The family home in Clapham was exchanged for a magnificent town house by Hyde Park and two hundred acres in Essex. He acquired Old ...”

“... North Vietnamese were ‘reacting defensively’. Nonetheless, Johnson personally lied to Senator William Fulbright, the highly respected chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in order to get him to sponsor the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in Congress. Ellsberg took all this calmly. He accepted Johnson’s campaign slogan for the 1964 Presidential ...”

“... is that he, Sterne, was simply adopting a persona. The hybrid allusion links him with two earlier masters of satirical comedy, with the further twist that certain passages in the volumes that follow were indeed first spoken by Democritus. In his 1989 book on plagiarism, Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon excoriated the academic special pleading that elevated Sterne ...”

“... place were not destitute in the languages, yet it is observ’d of them, they were by this made masters of the English tongue, and more of them excelled in that particular than of any school at that time. Here were produced of ministers, Mr Timothy Cruso, Mr Hannot of Yarmouth, Mr Nathaniel Taylor, Mr Owen and several others; and of another kind, poets ...”

“... phenomenon (despite Spartacus) of slave insurrections: these only occur, Marcus writes, ‘when we masters fail in our duty of care.’ To read a slave owner, even a fictitious one, speaking of ethics is unsettling. It also makes us think about the way moral discourse can be co-opted and used to justify the most repellent ideologies. Marcus’ manual is ...”

“... and his longevity are all we have to go on, since Tallis left almost nothing about himself. Unlike William Byrd and John Sheppard, he wrote no letters that have survived and never got into trouble with the law. Even his will is unrevealing, with no unusual legacies or defiant statements (Byrd used his to proclaim his allegiance to the pope). McCarthy ...”

“... all the people in the end is not a being but a theory’. The book has a cast of thousands: William James, Théodore Flournoy, Morton Prince (who failed to detect sexual wishes in his patients’ dreams and was given his marching orders), Eugen Bleuler, (Miss) Frank Miller (altruistically given to analysing her own poems), Otto Weininger (a ...”