“... picture of a Spain bristling with violence on the verge of becoming a world power. The historian William Atkinson could be called prescient for writing, early this century, that the accession of a woman is ‘an event commonly fraught with untoward consequences’. He was, however, talking about the ‘salvation’ of Castile in the 1470s, not Britain in ...”

“... from its war against Vietnam. The Middle East file fell by default to the then secretary of state, William Rogers, a conventional WASP public servant, Second World War veteran, lawyer and former attorney general. To the annoyance of Kissinger, who loathed him, Rogers took the job seriously. The Rogers Plan of December 1969 delivered a ceasefire in the costly ...”

“... resulting clash on 9 September 1513 was a disaster for the Scots. In a valley to the north of his camp on Flodden Edge, James suffered a heavy defeat. After coming under fire from the English cannon the Scottish forces advanced down the hill into the boggy valley, where their pikes proved no match for the old-fashioned billhooks used by the English. The loss ...”

“... farther reaches of living memory, not yet floated off into history. Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn and William Trevor’s Love and Summer address themselves with urgency to 1950s Ireland, not out of nostalgia, but because something needs to be understood, for the record, in the relationship between those days and the way we live now. The least detail, captured in ...”

“... Geronimo Rex – a disorganised redneck version of The Adventures of Augie March – won the William Faulkner Prize and a nomination for the National Book Award when it came out in 1976. His 1978 short-story collection, Airships, was even more successful, winning two prizes, but the increasingly fragmented and sometimes mediocre short novels and story ...”

“... illiterate older woman, Hanna, and his subsequent discovery that she had acted as a concentration camp guard in her youth. It has won great praise for its sensitive portrayal of a nearly impossible subject, and drawn angry criticism for its insensitive portrayal of a nearly impossible subject: a lesson that impossible subjects and heightened sensitivities ...”

“... and the song is ‘Talkin’ Al Kida Blues’ (‘Cuba’s our enemy, unless we need a prison camp’). Al Kida is the name of a man who lives ‘somewhere in Cleveland’: ‘He’s freaking out.’ The singer’s name is Dan Bern. His parents moved to Mount Vernon, Iowa, where Bern was born, round about the time that Robert Zimmerman started calling ...”

“... admirer of Zola and a writer for New York’s Evening Sun. They were in the studio of the painter William Dallgren, who was painting a portrait of Davies (maybe). Out with Davies! Out with Dallgren! Out with the bit of tooth Crane lost in a fistfight at 17 after he described a Tennyson poem as swill! Banishing Beer brings some sad losses but Sorrentino sticks ...”

“... as he stepped up his battle of words. Pound sought advice from the Berlin-based Nazi propagandist William Joyce (an Irishman known to his British enemies as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’) about effective broadcasting techniques. Maintaining he was the authentic voice of ‘United States heritage’, he made clear his particular opposition to ‘Churchill and ...”

“... experienced climate change but that they may, in part, have caused it. The palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has suggested that people started assaulting the ozone layer with greenhouse gases about eight thousand years ago, when farming began to replace hunting and gathering. Deforestation carried out by a growing population may have made the world ...”

“... was to her sisters. In her adolescence, she adopted a West Point haircut and signed her letters ‘William Cather, MD’. She graduated valedictorian (out of a class of three) at the age of sixteen and attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she met the folklorist and linguist Louise Pound. She later taught high-school English and wrote for ...”

“... in fear of being forcibly circumcised. In pride of place is the portrait of Coryate engraved by William Hole; around its cartouche lounge a trio of bosomy courtesans, one of whom is shown vomiting over his head. Another illustration by Hole, inserted in the text, shows Coryate bowing in greeting to a famous Venetian courtesan, Margarita Emiliana. The ...”

“... student to find out what her invitation referred to, and accepted it only when she learned that William James had been there before her, with his Varieties of Religious Experience). The lectures were subsequently put together, after her death in 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young ...”

“... those that Mandelstam might have seen on his long, arduous journey towards a prison transit camp, as he crossed the steppe. The poet concludes by reminding us that tragedy watches over everything, ‘has all under regard’. Tragedy is here made to sound a little like the police state, keeping tabs on all its citizens. Yet Hill properly marks our ...”

“... most fatalities in every army were a result of disease and neglected wounds. The great physician William Osler was a small boy in Canada at the time of the war, but he might well have had it in mind later when he used to say that a man was in much less danger of his life on a battlefield than in most hospitals. Nowhere was that truer than at Scutari, the ...”