“... for aspirants to literary fame to hack their way to a modest living. At this propitious moment, a North-countryman in his early twenties who had defied sound counsel to become a writer met an Anglo-Welshman – a native of London, six years his senior – in the same line. They lived for a time in adjacent lodgings. For a week they subsisted on cheese and ...”

“... evasion element in the returns on salt tax, the differential height of conscripts from the North and from the South – almost everything on which data are available, or even imaginable. Beneath this welter of information the reader, especially the average literary reader, may well feel Gradground out of comprehension: the issue of ‘the way of ...”

“... Morris, a genuine sorcerer’s apprentice who more or less accidentally more or less shut down North America. I call in at the newest local arcade for a fix and update. And find an oddly-slanted world-view with gigabytes lavished on witless graphics, millions of yen for development of which about 11p goes to the translator: ‘CHASE A DREADFUL CRIMER BEING ...”

“... to the Spanish courts viewed this exotic society, in which, as late as the 15th century, King John II of Castile had a Muslim bodyguard, and where, throughout the late Middle Ages, Spanish kings employed Jews as tax collectors and even confidential advisers, is an intriguing question. For by the end of the 14th century Spain was an anomaly in its ...”

“... thirties. He wasn’t experimental, at least not in the beguiling fashion of the far better known John Ashbery, who combines the exaltation of Wallace Stevens with the shrugging insouciance of Frank O’Hara in order to come up with poems as expressive and as inscrutable as Reverdy’s. If Merrill was experimental, then it was in the way Bach played with ...”

“... Danzig, Natalia Ginzburg’s divided Italy, Elizabeth Bowen’s London, Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other matters, these writers record the largest, most urgent set of human migrations the world has ever seen, and the ...”

“... I asked him if he would give away the prizes and draw the raffle at an Anti-Nazi League fête in North London. He was keen to do so, spent the whole afternoon at the fête, joined in the six-a-side football (he was terrifyingly furious with me for missing a penalty) and when I thanked him, he said he should be thanking me. ‘It’s not often I do something ...”

“... formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s rights activists and working-class representatives, sharing a platform with William Morris. He supported improving the lives of labouring Britons, while educating his audiences ...”

“... Japanese imperialism. After the Second World War Ajinomoto Co. established footholds in Europe and North America, though in the US it immediately faced home-grown competition from an identical flavouring cooked up by the International Minerals & Chemical Corporation of Chicago, unleashed under the slogan ‘Ac’cent makes food flavours sing.’By now ...”

“... itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a successful businessman. His mother, Saly, ran the two family homes. She gave him the nickname Izu, which he went on to adopt as his nom de guerre. Isou’s first, ongoing fight was with his father, and he found an ...”

“... life. The sharp decline of hitchhiking in the 1990s may have been informed by the geographer John Adams’s concept of the ‘risk thermostat’, one implication of which is that people’s perception of danger often differs wildly from statistical reality. The horror stories, in other words, were taking the place of less obvious underlying ...”

“... and 1640, the Empire of the kings of Spain stretched from the Philippines to the shores of the North Sea. The 19th-century Russian Empire covered more territory and the British had a larger population, but no other European empire was spread so widely or embraced so many different peoples. This behemoth has conventionally been called the Spanish Empire. At ...”

“... of mental vigour and resolve to overcome obstacles, which is indispensable to successful war.’ John Colville, Churchill’s secretary, recorded that ‘Churchill tried his hardest to elicit the general’s views and was met with the silence of shyness,’ while Wavell thought Churchill’s tactical ideas had got stuck somewhere around the time of the Boer ...”

“... of an equally penniless Devonian such as Ralegh. But one may be more sensitive to these nuances north of the Tweed. More serious, perhaps, is the omission of any reference to the most important Ralegh discovery in recent years, Mark Nicholls’s publication in 1995 of the prosecution summary of the evidence in the Main Plot trial of 1603. This is not the ...”

“... stickers urging people to help rebuild the country, but in 1999 a new rebel group emerged in the north: Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd). What Taylor had once seen in Doe Lurd now saw in Taylor: a regime which thrived on violence and corruption and which would have to be removed by force. The insurgents gained ground gradually over ...”