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“... widely and often, but his imagination was profoundly shaped by the places he visited, from the war-torn landscape of France to multicultural Navarre, from the slave markets of Genoa to the oppressive splendour of Milan. It is no accident that ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, the Canterbury Tales’s harrowing legend of an abused wife, takes place in ...”

“... a lesson. Godwin refused, so Edward called the Midland and Northern earls to back him up. Civil war was only prevented by the rank-and-file on both sides, who refused to fight other Englishmen over a quarrel among the elites.What sort of case can Licence make for his subject’s aims and abilities? It depends on what you want from a king. If you want the ...”

“... one’s foreign opponents seek to publicise one’s activities, but the continuing bureaucratic war for scarce resources not infrequently leads intelligence services to boast of their past coups. Moreover, when military intelligence becomes really important – that is, when there is a war on – large numbers of outside ...”

“... dynasties that flourished across the world between the fall of Napoleon and the Second World War. The story of these remarkable family businesses is far from hidden, though poorly understood. In the beginning were the patriarchs: Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), a contemporary of Goethe, who started off dealing antiquities in the Frankfurt ...”

“... back to the 1790s in such works as the Joseph and Leopold Cantatas, as well as the Friedelberg war songs, yet in central works – Solomon cites the Third and Fifth Symphonies, Fidelio and the Incidental Music to Egmont – this aggressive, quasi-militaristic style ‘was sublimated into a subtle and profound form of expression’. It is not surprising ...”

“... Thanks to his father’s service in the American Expeditionary Forces during the First World War, Said was an American citizen, and if he was reinventing himself, well, that’s what immigrants did in the New World. The Egyptian literary theorist Ihab Hassan had shed his Arab identity when he moved to the US, and had never looked back.But something in ...”

“... after a £100,000 investment, requires a certain amount of polyfilla prose.) Mr Nice, the working-class boyo, penetrated the middle classes, beginning with the ‘rivetingly glamorous Lynn Barber’, a future journalist who never forgot the experience. Onward and upward: bent aristos, dopers with great collections of blues records. A brief affair with the ...”

“... populism – a tone in which Crossman was to be something of a specialist. During a fairly good war, which he spent in the weird and suggestive interstices of the Political Warfare Executive, Crossman seems to have become an early private fan of the emerging ‘special relationship’: admiring the broader American resources and broader American minds, and ...”

“... a study of love in the light of that remark, but also in the light of other facts of life, such as war and death. The events of the Great War and what followed it left Gerhardie with a hatred and contempt for war, and the people who made war, sentiments ...”

“... night before a cataract operation. His courtship had been all but shattered by a religious tug-of-war, which led to a nervous breakdown: he clung to the mysteries of Christianity while his bride-to-be was a sturdy Unitarian. His daughter quotes from their courtship letters, as she later quotes from her own. At Oxford, as the Zuleika Dobson of the ...”

“... at Bryn Mawr, travelled to England at his invitation – not without difficulty, for the 1914 war was about to begin – only to find that he had no use for her, being otherwise engaged. He blamed her for the ensuing embarrassments: ‘her selfishness does not make me dislike her, tho’ it might make me hate her if I were made to suffer by it.’ So he ...”

“... By spring​ 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his autobiography describes ‘Rocky Acres’. After surviving years of front-line bombardment, a shell splinter through his right lung and the postwar influenza epidemic, Graves had returned to his cottage in the Welsh hills ...”

“... grandfathers, one Irish, the other Turkish, were both imprisoned without trial during World War Two. Jim O’Neill was arrested in 1940, when Eamon de Valera’s Government, fearful that IRA activities might compromise Eire’s neutrality, rounded up all known IRA men. He was held for four years at the Curragh internment camp in County Kildare. Joseph ...”

“... about my novels?’ The novels were not quite forgotten, however. Johnson sees the First World War as crucial in rescuing Austen from the ‘Aunt Jane’ tradition. In 1917 the travel writer and horticulturist Reginald Farrer published a centenary essay in the Quarterly Review, marking the transition from Victorian Janeism to a modernist version that saw ...”

“... who declined to send official condolences on the news of his death because he was a ‘first-class cad’. Hemingway, yet more succinctly, described him as a ‘jerk’. Despite all this it can often seem that d’Annunzio was indeed ‘capable of everything’. Poet, novelist, dramatist, bibliomaniac, fashion guru, serial seducer, cocaine ...”