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“... of which one is reminded by both Mordecai Richler’s anthology and Ernestine Schlant and Thomas Rimer’s collection of essays. There’s the fact, among many other examples, that US air bases on Japanese territory, acquired at the end of the Second World War, were used against Vietnam. There is the durability of Central European anti-semitism. And ...”

“... the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an ...”

“... off by ‘Ossian’, continued by Gray’s translations from the Norse, and in particular by Thomas Percy’s 1763 Five Pieces of Runic Poetry. Percy popularised one of the most enduring clichés of the genre, that Vikings were in the habit of drinking out of their enemies’ skulls, which stemmed from a misunderstanding of the complex Norse poetic ...”

“... because of the contradictory manifestations of Modernist effort – how does one reconcile Thomas Mann and Andy Warhol? – he can’t help but see the Modernist instinct as essentially an affirmative urge. Two-thirds of the way through his book, Gay states bluntly that ‘liberalism’ was the ‘fundamental principle of Modernism’. But whose ...”

“... work was required to keep the country stable. He had grown up in the shadow of his famous father, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was for forty years the bedrock of Elizabeth I’s government, and learned his complicated profession at his father’s side, as the elder Cecil struggled to maintain the Elizabethan regime. It is clear that father and son rarely ...”

“... intentions. How much we seem to learn, or recognise, about the Great War from his paragraphs on William Orpen and his commission from the Imperial War Museum for some pictures of the Versailles Peace Conference. Orpen felt in a rage against the whole event (‘The “frocks” had signed the Peace! The Army was forgotten’), and, finding he could not ...”

“... sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and compassionate, a humanist in the modern as well as the Tudor sense. It’s significant that he is a hunchback, a painful disability that affects how others see him as well as his own view of himself. He weeps ...”

“... with sources. In addition to official documents, chroniclers such as Henry Knighton, Adam Usk, Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart wrote detailed narratives, partisan but not of one mind. For obvious reasons, their histories focus on the nobility. Although England was a precociously centralised realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, it had neither a ...”

“... A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a book with a sharp edge, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells that too many subjects had escaped his wrath. ‘They burn in me; and they keep multiplying … but now they can’t ever be said. And besides, they would require a library – and a pen warmed-up in hell.’ This was a late ...”

“... around now that’s any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the un-American ...”

“... translation it could almost be the beginning of an 18th-century epistolary novel; even more so in William Melmoth’s version from 1746: ‘I propose pursuing the remainder of my journey to the province partly in light vessels, and partly in post-chaises.’) Pliny didn’t collect and arrange the 121 letters in Book Ten himself: his audience is not posterity ...”

“... private fiefdom in the mid-19th century, America produced its own brand of freebooters, including William Walker, the Tennessee doctor who conquered and ruled Nicaragua for ten months and decimated the population of Costa Rica.Until the end of the 19th century the US state was in no position to undertake imperial projects outside its region, and its projected ...”

“... and downs to which flesh is heir. He may not have the ‘heart’ of writers aching to be loved (Thomas Wolfe howling to the heavens), but his cool eye has proved an invaluable instrument. From his precocious debut with the war novel Williwaw, in 1946, up to the present moment, his focus has been keen, individual and unwavering. A thoroughbred workhorse, he ...”

“... passengers, who included the American tycoon Alfred Vanderbilt and the Welsh mining magnate D.A. Thomas. The German submarine U-20 had already torpedoed three British cargo vessels off the Irish coast. At lunchtime on 7 May its captain, Walther Schwieger, sighted a four-stack passenger liner, clearly British, and dived to intercept her. He fired a single ...”