“... Williams. We do not know what he is driving at. He is not at all tribal: the Welsh lords and masters are just as beastly as the Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans. He does not celebrate any of the ancestors, nor does he bring them to life. That AD 490 story of ‘teyrn’ and ‘taeog’ (roughly, ‘lord and tribute’ or ‘landlord and rent’) is an ...”

“... which was to serve as a talisman for so many French soldiers in Flanders. The anthropologist William Christian discovered the discarded negatives of a man who had worked at the Basque shrine of Ezquioga in the Thirties. Comparing them to the photographs which were chosen as official souvenirs, he found that the images only passed where the ...”

“... the general consensus in the early days was that television and politics didn’t mix. Thus Sir William Haley, Director-General of the BBC in the late Forties, believed that television was totally unsuited to political discussion. The ‘Fourteen Day Rule’, under which no subject likely to be debated in the Commons within the next fortnight could be ...”

“... themselves in the wrong lives: Adam Murray in his friend Johnny’s, John Chadwick in his rival William Nelson’s, Richard Verey in absolutely anyone’s but his own, Richard Fisher in that of the American spy Polina Mertz. The governing myth, I think, is Grimm’s. It is the story of the ferryman who presses the oars into the hands of a passenger, who is ...”

“... Attorney’s office, and the fortuitous presence of the Canadian intelligence co-ordinator Sir William Stephenson, Gouzenko might have shared the wretched fate of his ambassador, bundled onto a Soviet freighter in New York for home, and the mercies of the KGB. The pattern didn’t change until the Sixties, when we began to breed our own moles. Mr ...”

“... poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward Thomas, on the one hand, or William Carlos Williams, on the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the wisp, has nevertheless over the last twenty years moved perceptibly ...”

“... years later. In that time, Rumania has gone slowly through the process of succumbing to the German masters of Europe, and the Pringles have been forced out of the country to Athens, where Guy desperately attempts to keep up his classes. At the end of the third volume, Friends and Heroes, Greece has fallen to the Axis, and the Pringles are on their way to ...”

“... acquitted, the blame being laid on faulty charts or compasses, or force majeure; it is the masters and pilots who are likely to end up serving six months in the Marshalsea Prison. However, the captain of the Adventure brig achieved exquisite disgrace by being hanged at Execution Dock for scuttling his ship. One is reminded intermittently of Conrad’s ...”

“... Fuelled and sustained by the prophecies of Merlin and Taliesin, as interpreted by the local ‘masters of Brut’ or professional prophets, it encouraged those Welsh who had felt exiles in their own land since the victories of Edward I to pursue claims made as the original ‘Britons’. Glyn Dŵr had little trouble in linking himself with the long line of ...”

“... and inventors. Nonetheless, it was a Scottish (or at least Anglo-Scottish) educationalist, Sir William Spens, who in his 1938 report on the future of secondary education proposed that children should be given a place at grammar school if ‘family circumstance and tradition’ meant they were likely to work ‘with tongue and pen’ – in other words, not ...”

“... no grand assemblies were organised by its fellowship. According to the son of the botanist William Withering, another Lunar man, it was ‘one of the best private philosophical clubs in the kingdom’, broken up, so it was said, when Tory reaction in the wake of the French Revolution brought politics too near to its otherwise tranquil ...”

“... structure: widows inherited their husband’s stock; sons followed fathers, and apprentices their masters. The material instantiations of the nation’s lurching Reformation history can be seen in extant physical books today. Edward VI’s 1549 Act of Uniformity required every parish to obtain a copy of the Book of Common Prayer: a boon for printers, but an ...”

“... who ‘much later … compelled me to try and draw better’). Thankfully, Burne-Jones also had William Morris, his friend from university. They had chosen the cause of art together, and Morris was to barrel their joint enterprise along for the next forty years or so. Burne-Jones’s earliest works, done in the late 1850s, were in pen-and-ink, one of ...”

“... Satyamurthy (‘the wise one’), henceforth known to all as Satyam, was five and his brother, William Carey, was two. Their sister, Mary Manjulabai, was born in Vizag. The parents got jobs as teachers in Christian schools and earned enough to rent a modest apartment. The landlord was a caste Hindu and so they lied, claiming they had converted to ...”

“... It isn’t Salter’s language alone that numbers him among the masters, but it is what strikes you first. From Light Years of 1975: ‘On the stands in nearby orchards were hard, yellow apples filled with powerful juice. They exploded against the teeth, they spat white flecks like arguments.’ From the story ‘Am Strande von Tanger’, on the death of a bird: ‘A heart no bigger than an orange seed has ceased to beat ...”