“... Welles anticipated Andy Warhol, who also enjoys a posthumous existence as a movie character.) George Orson Welles was born in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York theatregoers in the 1930s and who, when not spooking radio listeners as the ...”

“... cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St George, in the Crimea, to Kalerga, on the Bulgarian shore. Information about the course of the war was brought to the British public with great speed by the Times’s Applegath rotary printing press, which could deliver ten thousand impressions an hour. It’s ...”

“... and early modern Catholicism. Building on the work of Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Véronique Dasen, George Galavaris and Aden Kumler, he takes in not only objects of devotion and theological works but also lives of saints, ephemeral printed matter, even culinary implements.The premodern cosmos was structured by mysterious correspondences which modern scholars ...”

“... such as it is, has been largely transmitted via his impact on Milton and Shakespeare: in 1896 George Bernard Shaw could still suggest that the only reason for reading Marlowe (whom he dismissed as ‘the true Elizabethan blank verse beast … wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion’) was in order better to ...”

“... and bills of sale, Marks and his team of researchers unearthed some unexpected gems. The diary of George Hunter White, a dead Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent, was particularly startling. White had worked as Gottlieb’s fixer in the underworlds of New York and San Francisco, conducting drug experiments on unknowing subjects in brothels or at parties he held ...”

“... royal work, was twenty years in the making, but thought so dreadful that Victoria’s grandson George V had it destroyed (it lives on in various copies and mezzotints). She had laid out her vision for the picture in her journal: ‘the solitude, the sport, and the Highlanders in the water &c. will be, as Landseer says, a beautiful historical ...”

“... their own dignity and secure their own liberty. But as one of the leading historians of slavery, Walter Johnson, recently observed, much of the newer scholarship has been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée ...”

“... alone at night. Fretting about her safety, Kennedy was talked into arranging a lobotomy by Walter Freeman, head of neurology at George Washington University and chief evangelist for the procedure. Freeman insisted that it could cure Rosemary’s tantrums, irritability and violence; in fact the operation was a ...”

“... but excitedly shameless (‘Ho, everyone that thirsteth’), or it can be the equivalent of George V’s sentiments on the subject (‘Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?). One wonders how its early readers could have mistaken the meaning of that poem, No 44 in A Shropshire Lad, or that of No 45 – ‘If it chance your eye offend you’ – but ...”

“... she finds, were met over and over again with an excessive response. From the execution of George William Gordon, a member of the Jamaican National Assembly, for allegedly inciting the 1865 rebellion at Morant Bay, to the conviction for conspiracy of the Meerut defendants in India in 1933 for organising a railway strike, the dynamic of rebellion and ...”

“... to withdrawal in Vietnam was meant to ‘neutralise’ supporters of the Southern Democrat George Wallace, who was trying to get the 1972 nomination. If Nixon pulled out too quickly, he warned, Wallace’s 13 per cent of the 1968 vote – he had run as an independent candidate on a segregationist ticket and split the right-wing vote – could balloon ...”

“... themselves at the mercy of some ruthless tribe of Iroquois or Sioux. Noting the success of Sir Walter Scott, from whose life and writing he learned so much, Cooper found in fiction a means of restoring his family’s fortunes. His most famous creation was the frontiersman Natty Bumppo, also known as Leatherstocking (on account of his leggings), Hawk-eye ...”

“... presented itself to him as an opportunity for experiment. While thousands were weeping at George Whitefield’s outdoor meeting in Philadelphia, Franklin, instead of getting closer to hear the preacher better, walked away to reach the limit of Whitefield’s voice and so calculate the maximum number of people who could fit within the area – and ...”

“... peacefully sails out to sea, leaving the city in its own quiet self-consuming hellishness. Sir Walter goes on for ever reading his own life in the Baronetage; William Walter Elliot is for ever defined as bad by the simple statement that too many people like him – he lives as social image. Like Henry James’s Madame ...”

“... of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby estate in Teesdale, thought to have been named by Walter Scott after the song of that title by the Irish Romantic poet Thomas Moore. This was then the only place I knew of so named. Next came a beautiful lake at Killarney which turned out to be called the Meeting of the Waters; again, it’s believed, at ...”