“... and inspires me and many thousands of other children with tales about families learning to camp and sail and climb and skate and smelt copper. Such for Thompson are the prime markers in the history of the Lake District. The social world in which these famous witnesses lived, from which they drew material and impetus, creeps in on the margins of the ...”

“... scenes evoked purely for their own sake. This returns us to Kleinzahler’s New Jersey precursor, William Carlos Williams, and his deceptively simple rallying cry, ‘no ideas but in things’. Of course the things that get thrown up by the New Jersey landscape are rarely conventionally beautiful, yet many of Kleinzahler’s most compelling poems work by ...”

“... in what we now call France had discovered that a castle did not have to be a huge fortified camp in the ancient or Roman manner, designed to shield a population from invaders. Similar building techniques could make a castle small and tall, and it could be designed not to shelter but to subject local populations. From his tower the proprietor could ...”

“... crusade, he had enlisted in Marshal Schomberg’s regiments of refugee Frenchmen fighting for William of Orange against the Catholic King James in Ireland, and ended up dying in Belfast, like so many soldiers in early modern armies, not fighting in battle, but from a disease caught in camp in Dundalk. His son, another ...”

“... figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ‘gamechanger’ of ...”

“... the anecdotes I will include here provide some context for the subsequent doings of Lieutenant William Calley and his comrades. Adviser Mike Sutton one day landed in a Huey helicopter in a Delta hamlet where a limp figure was hanging from ropes lashed to a tree – the village chief, disembowelled during the night by Vietcong guerrillas. His wife had been ...”

“... running an industrial school at Feltham, where young delinquents were treated on modern ‘boot camp’ lines; but corrective establishments in the main probably had little to learn from the military. The Salvation Army receives only the briefest mention. Its annals show that ‘General’ William Booth had never wanted ...”

“... novelist, Cambridge professor and intellectual militant, even though he was in the opposite camp to Williams’s own. C.S. Lewis, author of academic classics such as The Allegory of Love, died in 1963 in his 65th year. Today his memory stays alive far from the academic world, in the reading of children and Science Fiction fans, and in Christian ...”

“... of protest’ swinging between left and right (thinking, presumably, that protest today must mean William Hague). But contemporary protesters have given up on the pendulum. Protest today is against neo-liberalism, global financial interests, international corporations and all politicians – right, left or centre – who support them. In Crystal ...”

“... Gift’, where the useless youth whose middle name is Glasse discovers his métier by the camp fire and is assured by his mentor that ‘a good cook, even on Board of Trade allowance, has brought many a ship to port that ‘ud otherwise ’ave mut’nied on the’igh seas.’ For a hundred and fifty years, ever since the best jobs in London kitchens ...”

“... of politics. The now semi-legendary Thompson announced in 1955 that Carpenter (unlike, of course, William Morris) represented the cosy intellectualism of those ‘whose aspirations are satisfied today by comfortably converted old cottages on the rural fringes of great towns, a goat in the paddock, and an occasional bout of classless bonhomie and darts in the ...”

“... fenced compounds’. As for the ‘liberties taken’ (a phrase I had thought confined nowadays to camp comedy) by 20th-century rulers, the blame simply won’t stick to 19th-century thinkers. The ‘parallel’ between ‘the boundaries of thought’ and ‘the integrity of persons’ does not exist except in Mr Harbison’s purple phrase-book. He might as ...”

“... plank bed by the hair of her head and thrown into the oven alive’ at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was born Comtesse de Chambure and married a ‘bold and jealous Belgian baron’ from whom Baron Rothschild managed to snatch her after he had made her pregnant. He is now 82, so it is not surprising he needed help with all this material. How lucky he ...”

“... their mouths full’. A very tall man is writing a book about famous short people (‘Faulkner. William Faulkner. Tiny. Absolutely minuscule. Nearest thing to a homunculus. Made Truman Capote look like Steve Reeves’) and there is a splendid sequence concerning the after-effects of a vigorous game of squash on a well-preserved but stiffening older man ...”

“... between disagreement and disloyalty. But I think there is more to it. How do you get someone like William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, to torch their own reputation and suborn themselves to your will? The real question of the relationship between the mad king and his clever, upright ministers is not about the abuse that the ministers suffer, or the ...”