“... Brontë was not yet 21, she submitted a sample of her work to the reigning poet laureate, Robert Southey, together with a letter in which she apparently confided her ambition ‘to be for ever known’ as a poet. Three months later, Southey replied. Though he acknowledged her gift and encouraged her to continue writing ‘for its own sake’, he also ...”

“... Wren, came along at exactly the moment when he had fully mastered the ‘High Game’. But, as Robert Grant Irving’s fascinating study in the architecture of politics and the politics of architecture makes abundantly clear, there was far more to the making of New Delhi than the design of the buildings. His narrative is dominated by political events ...”

“... artist, to develop rather than possess innately). While Schuyler and his circle tolerated Auden, Robert Lowell and his reputation gave them fits. Schuyler would define his poetic project, at least in part, by opposing it to that of Lowell and the other gloomy campus darlings of the New Critics: New York poets, except I suppose the colour-blind, are affected ...”

“... all night. Everyone except the girl and one frostbitten man died. Their Indian rescuers hacked graves from the solid earth. We now know that it really was much colder back then. The early modern period, c.1500-1750, coincided with the Little Ice Age, an era of plummeting temperatures that succeeded the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from the 10th ...”

“... highlight the astonishing scarcity of major civil war burial sites. Two, maybe three, mass graves have been scientifically excavated (they disagree over the identification of a recent big find in York). Parish registers offer few clues. Churchwardens didn’t want dead soldiers clogging the record and while they might note the burial of local ...”

“... which takes place at the private Seabrook College, the beleaguered history teacher, Howard, reads Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and becomes obsessed not just with the First World War but with the mythology of the White Goddess.Murray’s work isn’t quite like that of any other writer – certainly no modern Irish writer – but he has learned a ...”

“... imagined the dead addressing him: ye are here, ye men of war, digging trenches – digging graves dying where we died before. He spent much of the rest of the war in England commuting to various army camps from Crockfords, where he continued to gamble, often right through the night, usually winning even when he wasn’t sober. Once, returning late and ...”

“... There is no doubt an art of political slander, as Robert Darnton terms it, and in many places something like what Charles Walton calls a ‘culture of calumny’. But in what ways are they particular to a time and place? How different, for example, are the charges of lesbianism and Machiavellian manoeuvring levelled against Hillary Clinton from those published two centuries earlier against Marie Antoinette (leaving aside for the moment the rather different outcomes for the two women)? True, Hillary was not accused of committing incest with her child, but she was linked with various financial scandals and even portrayed as ordering the murder of the deputy White House counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions ...”

“... were plagued by desertions and forced to rely on incompetent, lethargic recruits to fill the mass graves that the generals were preparing for them in Tennessee and Virginia. The carnage was unprecedented as both armies repeatedly marched head on, often uphill, into concentrated fire from entrenched fortifications. By the end of the war, most participants ...”

“... President Andrew Jackson said: ‘Doubtless it will be painful’ for the Indians ‘to leave the graves of their fathers; but what do they more than our ancestors did, or than our children are now doing? ... Does humanity weep at these painful separations from everything, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from ...”

“... the most cosmopolitan writers of the time: one thinks of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Robert Louis Stevenson. Every single great idea that fuelled the driving force of the 19th century – freedom, human greatness, compassion, but also the subcurrents of history uncovered by contemporaries, such as the libido, the unconscious and the uncanny ...”

“... witchy: she is always accompanied by a cool breeze, has a way of losing her husbands to premature graves, and when she first enters the story, the clerk at the hotel has a stroke when she appears in the lobby. I met Dubravka Ugrešić before all this, in the late 1980s at a conference in San Francisco which gathered together writers from countries on both ...”

“... her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is ...”

“... in ‘The creatures of ice feignt and advance’ (or the truest poetry is the most feigning); on Robert Lowell’s achieving what is rare in him, a telling sequence, in his Selected Poems, ‘Nineteen Thirties’, 25 poems formerly scattered and now finding the arc they were meant for – on all these and on much else (Yeats’s fascism, and ...”

“... and effective – cadres bashed in their victims’ skulls and then pushed the bodies into mass graves – yet because the senior leadership maintained an organisational structure more secretive than that of the Nazis, scholars still struggle to explain who Pol Pot was, what drove him to this madness, and how Cambodian society allowed itself to be ...”