“... loan-jobbers, forestallers and other wartime profiteers accused of ripping off ordinary people. Walter Scott, part of a cavalry troop raised to ensure stability on the home front, the Royal Edinburgh Volunteer Light Dragoons, found his conscience troubled when he was confronted in the line of duty with the looting of a bread shop: ‘Truth to say it was a ...”

“... field, as painting and sculpture were pressured by photography and film, and modernists like Walter Benjamin and László Moholy-Nagy redefined literacy as the ability to read both. For Benjamin, the reproducibility of these media not only shattered the auratic power of the unique work (this was mostly wishful thinking) but, in doing so, opened artistic ...”

“... for a North Sea ferry and postage stamps of Queen Victoria in the shell carriage and King George V as Neptune. Panel 78 charts the rise of Mussolini; Warburg was in Rome in 1929, and witnessed what he called its ‘repaganisation’. The final panel includes a photograph of a hara-kiri ceremony, two late 15th-century depictions of the desecration of ...”

“... travellers because she was a replica of her ill-fated kin, a relic of the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of ...”

“... platform for his articles on the breakdown of English civilisation, complete with swipes at Lloyd George and his perfidious controllers, the Northcliffe press, bankers, Prussians and Jews. Converting to his master’s Roman Catholicism, Cecil also adopted his antisemitism, which emerges when he remarks in his rather patronising little book on his brother that ...”

“... executor to deflect most of the money away from the obvious political uses that had been intended. George Bernard Shaw’s indignant account of a subsequent meeting of the Fabian executive, at which Webb ‘hinted that the bequest had been left to him to dispose of as he thought fit, and that the executive had nothing to do with it’, was not just Shavian ...”

“... black businesses were owned by West Indians. In 1952, however, when Congress passed the McCarran Walter Act restricting migration, prospective migrants to the US were obliged to reconsider. The United Kingdom, where some of their kin had already settled, was an obvious choice. Officially, 492 West Indians, the majority of them Jamaican men with an average ...”

“... presented devolution as a plan to secure the Union; put another way, in the partisan words of George Robertson, it would ‘kill nationalism stone-dead’. However, others begged to differ. Not only the Tories, but also Labour’s open devo-sceptic, Tam Dalyell, contended that home rule and the resulting potential for friction between Edinburgh and ...”

“... to say nothing of the tortuosity of the style’), it made him realise ‘the English richness of George Eliot’ and ‘the superiority of English culture and the English mind to the French’. In this he was expressing New England’s special sense of the English as well as of the French. He moved to London at the end of 1876, and installed himself at once ...”

“... pioneering Thesaurus of the Northern languages, but again did not pick up popularity till after Walter Scott. ‘Valkyries’ were introduced to English by Gray in 1768, closely followed by Percy’s translation of the Swiss professor Paul-Henri Mallet’s Monuments de la mythologie et de la poésie des Celtes et particulièrement des anciens ...”

“... and Emily Apter, in Against World Literature (2013), connects his secular theology to that of Walter Benjamin. Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1892, took a doctorate in law at the University of Heidelberg, served in the army during World War One, took another doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Greifswald, was librarian at the Prussian ...”

“... for a historical novel in the form of a dramatic monologue spoken by the (real-life) biographer George Ticknor about his (real-life) subject, the historian William Prescott. But recent projects have been more collaborative: in 2009, Heti appeared as ‘Leonore’ in Leanne Shapton’s love story disguised as an auction catalogue, Important Artefacts and ...”

“... It can all make one feel a bit déclassé, or indeed jamais classé. And our form guide is Walter Garrison, 3rd Viscount Runciman, the former president of the British Academy, whose jacket photo shows him sitting, presumably in his study in Cambridge, fingers interlaced, gazing evenly at the reader. It’s fitting, then, that the three greats are ...”

“... is they’re all so plain.’ (He married a rather attractive Quaker of about his own age.) George VI should have known better. But we are all to be forgiven for having supposed, if we had ever heard of the Muggletonians, that there were none of them left, that there had been none left for two or three centuries. But we were proved wrong in 1974, when ...”

“... remain a stinging nettle in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels. They drafted a nicely shaped psychological plot for their subjects, and then – whenever the subject failed to follow that plot – twisted or invented the evidence with ...”