“... Marbot (1803, now at the Tate) and Lady Catherine (1804, Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland); William Turner and Sir David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope) were frequent guests; on his solitary rides in the Lakes he often called on De Quincey (then editor of the Westmorland Gazette), and visited ...”

“... timber framing. The carpenter, Richard Dale, whose name appears with that of the owner, William Moreton, on one of the windows, gave the framing a raking design which creates on the exterior an elaborate dazzle effect. Starting out with an H-plan house, Dale and Moreton added every latest feature, beginning with a fireplace and moving on to bay ...”

“... hellish cacophony of sounds, ranging from screaming rabbits to Buddhist chants. The FBI director, William Sessions, began to worry that his men were suffering from fatigue. Concluding that no more cult members would be released, Sessions and Janet Reno, the newly-appointed Attorney-General who was in overall charge of the operation, decided to smoke out the ...”

“... A hundred and fifty years ago William Thackeray observed – after a trawl through London bookstalls – that middle-class litterateurs like himself knew (and cared) less about working-class literature than about Lapland. In a much quoted essay twenty years later, Wilkie Collins, after a similar expedition, coined the phrase ‘the Unknown Public ...”

“... bulk of the scholarly research on both in the post-war period has been in English, as the names of William Johnston, William McGrath, Carl Schorske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Andrew Whiteside and John Boyer testify.* There are a number of plausible reasons for this. The first and most obvious is the great diaspora of ...”

“... sin? Unless of course she was not entirely innocent. After all, she was not physically forced ... William Empson, Donaldson notes, found St Augustine’s insinuation ‘caddish’, which it probably is. But one can fail to be a gentleman and still make sense, and even get onto the church calendar. Why does Lucretia kill herself? This is in part a question ...”

“... the signs of our needs, with mythologies. The protagonist in Parrot’s Perch collects facts about Christian martyrs with a view to undoing our fascination with pain. But doesn’t the fascination remain in the collection itself, isn’t the gathering ‘stained with a secret complicity’? The characters in Maggie Gee’s Light Years keep going to London Zoo ...”

“... have contributed to a volume entitled The English World, for all its slap-up production, its William Morris end-papers and no end of gorgeous illustrations. For a start, could you have a more catchpenny title? The word ‘world’ here means everything and nothing, and it is left entirely to the reader to give it definition. I am being unfair, for many ...”

“... tongues. How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the ...”

“... of the archipelago to the end of the 20th century.’ His view of Irish history is the one the Christian Brothers taught me – which doesn’t make it all wrong, just difficult to reconcile with Morrill’s revisionism. The clash becomes explicit in a discreetly buried footnote in which Morrill suggests that the Early Modern period saw the emergence of a ...”

“... the Armageddon-loving forces of darkness, some of which have Muslim names. One critic of the Christian fiction on which the game is based, the dean of a seminary, criticised it for representing an awful will to power on the part of man, ‘putting Evangelical Christians in the heroic role of God’s Green Berets’. The puzzle of what these games do to ...”

“... out of complacency, and more alert to the suffering of others. Molesworth had been taught by William Gaskell, the Unitarian minister and husband of Elizabeth Gaskell, who was another accomplished practitioner of supernatural fiction. Gaskell’s ghost stories, more ambitious and substantial than Molesworth’s (try her unforgettable ‘Old Nurse’s ...”

“... local Powhatans, pitied as benighted pagans. The other two graves were of military captains: William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate ...”

“... in part to distinguish their activities from other forms of radicalism (William Beckford, for instance, was a ‘parliamentary radical’ who had supported voting reforms at the end of the 18th century, but he was also the owner of thirteen sugar plantations and around three thousand enslaved people). The description also implies a ...”

“... dated to between 1066 and 1100, and more to the anarchy after 1135. Looking back on the 1140s, William of Malmesbury would write that ‘castles multiplied throughout England, each defending its own space, or indeed, to say it more truthfully, plundering it.’ Henry II Plantagenet made his first act in England the destruction of all the castles he could ...”