“... of 19th-century Britain: second and favourite son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, brother of Matthew and William Delafield Arnold, brother-in-law of W.E. Forster, father of Mrs Humphry Ward, grandfather of Julian and Aldous Huxley and of Mrs G.M. Trevelyan. His knockabout career helped enlarge his connections. At Oxford he stood on even closer terms of friendship ...”

“... narrator’s tone remains, in keeping with his personality, resolutely Apollonian. The novel is William Beckwith’s account of summer 1983, during which he was ‘riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my grande époque.’ Will is 25, from a recently aristocratic family (his grandfather was ennobled for his services as Director of Public ...”

“... 11 September undid centuries of Christian teaching and made revenge respectable again, just as William Harris is over the top when he opines: ‘In the United States, views about revenge seem to have sunk to a level appropriate to a neolithic village.’ But it is troubling how much public talk of revenge there is at present. This study of rage restraint ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Lowell and Berryman, whose work shows in every line, have had the attention they deserve, while William Carlos Williams has been slighted or ignored. Frank O’Hara, like Eliot, inherited two traditions, one American, the other French. Although he says, half-serious, ‘of the American poets only Whitman and Crane and Williams are better than the ...”

“... Not quite yet. And who but the press looks forward to the homage from the Hitchens camp: the opera buffa novelists, the prickly atheists and Muslim-baiters, the warrior intellectuals pondering their just wars? Can anything strike a harsher blow to a celebrity’s standing, dead or alive, than the thoughts of his close friends? Hitchens has an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”