“... couch, attending to war, is really so much if you need courage and history in your life. The film took ten years to make, at a cost of $30 million. That’s a lot of money by documentary standards, but it was done in the Burns tradition: there was a seeding deal with PBS, but the greater part of the money was raised by Burns himself, a visionary documenter of ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... her only novel, bringing together material – including the few unfinished pieces Paul Bowles took from her many notebooks after her death, and a handful of letters – from several earlier collections. Yet the temptation to romanticise or over-identify with Bowles herself remains. Her biographer, Millicent Dillon, who did much to draw people’s ...”

“... did not prevent him from daredevil jumps off high railings at Oxford, or the small leap that he took at 66, exacerbating an angina condition and bringing on his death. He was on his way to catch a horse-drawn tram at Dingle Bank, where he was visiting a Liverpool sister. Nor did all his social climbing, his delight in fashion and happy Georgian ...”

“... of The White Goddess (1948), his synoptic account of the history of Western myth. His eccentricity took many forms, as many as the mercurial goddess herself, yet Graves seems never to have doubted the central narrative to which his life and work were dedicated: There is one story and one story only That will prove worth your telling he declares in one of his ...”

“... late Victorian causes. In the spring of 1854, Roger Tichborne, a roving, hard-drinking ex-dragoon, took ship on the Bella bound for Kingston, Jamaica, out of Rio, the only passenger alongside a cargo of coffee. Neither Roger nor the ship was ever seen again. His mother, Henriette, refused to believe that he was dead. An old sailor turned up at Tichborne House ...”

“... centralising state and the bourgeois freedom it allowed. Economic revival in France in particular took the form of internal, intensive colonisation: town, country and market were brought closer together, while the crown consolidated its territorial power.But the Medieval Warm Period wasn’t restricted to Europe, and elsewhere it helped to facilitate ...”

“... to the Roman people at the dedication of the Lateran Church that Constantine built’ (i.e. St John Lateran), and Sylvester, in the robes of papal office and attended by servants with holy vessels. True, the sculptor had failed to enter the year when all this happened. But the quality of the carvings, which resembled the crude reliefs on the Arch of ...”

“... Nico, on which she sings some of the band’s best-known tracks, but they were not welcoming. John Cale recalled that, listening back to rehearsal tapes, they would ‘hear her go off-key or hit the wrong pitch at the start. We would sit there and snigger.’ Lou Reed, understandably, wanted to sing his songs himself, but Warhol and Morrissey were ...”

“... which he believed he had to hit his co-star: ‘No, I can’t hit a woman!’ Hopper, I imagine, took a deep breath before explaining ‘that you never actually hit anyone in a movie, that it was all faked, but the film was cut in such a way as to give the impression that it actually happened’. Being part of and owning the real world through acting and ...”

“... is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David ...”

“... of the Standard Oil Company, the series did little to celebrate the company or its founder, John D. Rockefeller. ‘It is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair,’ Tarbell wrote. But she didn’t call for an end to the corporate form Rockefeller had done so much to ...”

“... is found dead and blackened in his bed and in due course so is his grandson. Later, I dabbled in John Evelyn’s Sylva. Reprehensibly perhaps, I’ve never paid as much attention to my surroundings on a country walk as I have to descriptions of the natural world in books, all the better in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t ...”

“... his first wife, having to uproot herself every few months with their little son, Otto, as Crippen took a new post at another homeopathic or ophthalmic hospital. By the time of her death in 1892, at 33, her husband had abandoned jobs in Ohio, San Diego, Detroit, New York and Salt Lake City. He had also, thanks to his mentor Dr Phil Porter (‘one of ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”