“... call-up in the summer of 1941. Smith writes well about Williams’s war, both on the inanities of camp-bound life between 1941 and 1944, and then on the terrifyingly immediate chance of being burned alive in an armoured vehicle while on active service. Williams served right through, from the invasion of Normandy to the end of hostilities, as an officer in an ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... horse, Babieca, or Bauieca, which first appears in the Poema, seems to have been borrowed from William of Orange’s horse, Bauçan.At the time of Rodrigo’s birth, political unity had disintegrated across Andalusia with the fall of the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba in 1031. Its collapse left a patchwork of principalities called taifas, or ...”

“... the rest of Hong Kong, ‘ceded in perpetuity’, back to mother China. That lion-hearted Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who died while he was trying to solve the Irish Question, said of the First Opium War, which ended with Hong Kong under British rule: ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with ...”

“... 25,000 communists were in ‘protective custody’. Dachau, the first official concentration camp, was set up to hold them. Hobsbawm, whose parents had died within two years of each other, was living with his aunt in the Halensee district. He was not a member of the KPD, but of its dependency the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Socialist Students ...”

“... years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), the first-person novelisation of a historical account left by a rebel slave awaiting execution. By ‘refusing the perspectival limitations imposed by his own whiteness,’ McGurl claims, Styron’s novel ...”

“... or in what Othello calls ‘the palate of my appetite’: ‘I had been happy if the general camp,/Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body.’ But such images are complicated by their subterranean connection with the Moor’s memories of actual cannibalism in a speech that might imply a dangerous affinity between this ‘erring barbarian’ and the ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender ...”

“... the 1980s and 1990s by Alzina Stone Dale and Joseph Pearce. More critical studies by Ian Ker and William Oddie have emphasised the links between a life spent joyfully giving no thought to the morrow and the apologetic books, which argue that only Christian belief can supply a maximum of wonder at this world’s existence and a maximum refusal to take it to ...”

“... in precisely the way I myself shaped it.’ Nadezhda Mandelstam (whose husband, Osip, became ‘camp dust’ in 1938) put it down to a combination of sheer luck and Pasternak’s ‘incredible charm’. Others wondered whether Stalin had personally ordered him to be spared – ‘Leave him alone, he’s a cloud dweller’ – after gifting him what were ...”

“... of the Iron Lady. It struck me then that no one had done such systematic damage to the North since William the Conqueror. This produces squeals of delight but they’re not enough to persuade me to say it on TV.Deaf with (and these days even without) my cold, I hear a mention of the Stone Roses on the radio as Cold Moses which, as the name of a group, would ...”

“... his life. Frederick the Great died in 1786, to be succeeded by the notably unenlightened Frederick William II; and if the storming of the Bastille seemed to herald an enlightened age in France (‘I have seen the glory of the world,’ Kant said), the subsequent course of the Revolution was not so gratifying. A generation later, however, the amalgam of ...”

“... machine broke down.The man who improved on the vacuum tube was the London-born American physicist William Shockley. After the war, Shockley was employed at Bell Labs, the research branch of the US telephone monopoly, AT&T. He realised that certain chemical elements could perform a similar function of encoding and transmitting 1s and 0s. Conducting materials ...”

“... and wrote in the afternoons. ‘My inspiration for my stories came partly from my reading of William Saroyan, and my unthinking delight, “I can do that too.”’ In the evenings she went to ethics, logic and psychology lectures at the university, and once a week she met up with the ‘young handsome’ John Money, ‘glistening with newly applied ...”