“... son to Stellenbosch University. There, he might have encountered nationalist ideas. As it was, he took a job with an anti-Afrikaner newspaper in the very British city of Durban and decided to become an English writer. Christened Lourens, he began to call himself Laurens, a name that he liked to pretend recalled Huguenot descent, but in some of the stories his ...”

“... In 1644, the Puritan cleric John Shaw journeyed up to Westmorland to instruct the local people, who, he had been told, were sadly lacking in knowledge of the Bible. The need was confirmed when he interrogated an old man whose long life in the wake of the Reformation seemed to have left him entirely ignorant of all matters theological and ecclesiastical ...”

“... It took G.K. Chesterton to discover, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, this lethal vignette of a World War One profiteer: The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I. In World War Two, the pot-bellied profiteers of the cartoonists shared a crowded roll of dishonour with a multitude of thieves, chisellers, racketeers and spivs, whose activities are mercilessly set out in An Underworld at War ...”

“... around bits of their content: the New York Times did that with its op-ed material, but then took the wall down. The apparent reason was that the drop in traffic caused by the paywall was so great that it ended up costing money, because the paper’s internet ads reached so many fewer readers. The new revenue was nowhere near enough to compensate from ...”

“... and swearing. In the polarised atmosphere of George III’s reign, a host of political clubs took root. John Wilkes’s success in mobilising antigovernment sentiment during the 1760s owed much to a battery of radical associations, including the Anti-Gallican, Beefsteak and Albion clubs, and the masonic lodges. From ...”

“... enters in majesty and introduces the instruments of modern science. The open-air production took full shape during Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up ...”

“... to leave France in the face of royal prohibition, they continued to be busy and productive. John Houblon, from a Huguenot family which had arrived from France in a slightly earlier wave of Catholic persecution, became the first governor of the Bank of England in 1694 and a knight of the realm; until 2014, his luxuriantly bewigged features adorned our ...”

“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... having sex together. When they went on holiday to the seaside town of Portobello the teachers took Jane Cumming with them: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods shared a bed; Miss Cumming slept in a bed at the foot of theirs. She claimed it was at Portobello that she had first been disturbed by whispering, kissing and ‘shaking the bed’ in the early mornings. She ...”

“... By God, America is great, and so are its scholarly books. This one is 572 pages long and it took the author twenty years to write. Longer than Katherine Anne Porter found to write the whole of her resplendent work. Joan Givner’s book might be called light plane reading, except that it is heartlessly grave, gravid though fruitless, and would take the most receptive astronauts a moon-flight to try to sleep through, its dulled prose keeping them tossing and turning all the way ...”

“... actress Simone Benda, who pulled every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took to racing cars and flying – ‘like Peter Pan’, he told Francis Jammes. Le Grand Meaulnes was written, for the most part, in Rue Cassini. If he had survived the war, what would he have written? Not, probably, Colombe Blanchet, which he had begun, but, as ...”

“... I was a sinner too and was mean to me, meaner than the others really. I felt bad because she took care of my sister and wouldn’t even let me in the kitchen with them. I was in constant terror of mother and grandpa and awful school torments too. I was expelled from two schools and ran away from one in first year. However in El Paso I met my first and ...”

“... wretchedly unsure of herself – she once felt like throwing it in the farm dam – but when she took the book to London soon afterwards, it had a wide success and the young author was swept up in freethinking, socialist and Utopian circles. The real attraction and challenge of Olive Schreiner for her many biographers is to take hold of a multi-sided career ...”

“... help from the tardy Prussians. Siborne’s heresy, Hofschröer contends, proved his undoing. He took enormous care in the construction of the model: an experienced cartographer, he visited the site in Belgium, and he read all the accounts of the battle. Most diligently of all, he questioned as many Waterloo veterans – British, Hanoverian, Prussian and ...”

“... should fairly be credited with more successes than failures, even at the time when millions took to the streets to denounce him. Right up to the end of February, he seemed to have the better of the argument. Who would have thought that Iraq’s benighted regime would submit to this degree of containment by a peaceful UN process, backed by the credible ...”