“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a bad thing, then certainly one not worth spending time acquiring, was the no-nonsense ruralist William Cobbett, who declared that ‘the differences’ in pronunciation ‘are of very little real consequence . . . though the Scotch say coorn, the Londoners cawn, and the Hampshire folk carn, we all know they mean to say corn.’ Cobbett believed that the ...”

“... acting, clearly liked ‘this nameless mode of naming the unnameable’. She told Hunt that William Godwin, her father, had brought out a new two-volume edition of the novel on the strength of the interest generated by the dramatisation. Three more stage versions of Frankenstein had opened by early September, including the burlesque Humgumption; or Dr ...”

“... of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 square feet in more than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came ...”

“... greater misery’, a ‘female Werther’, even a second Goethe, the still grieving widower William Godwin was forced to concede that his improbable dear was ‘what Dr Johnson would have called, “a very good hater”’. ‘Indignation,’ he noted, ‘was an emotion of which she was strongly susceptible.’ This was tactful understatement. She was ...”

“... who commissioned Leutze’s painting, probably knew and had certainly read his fellow Bostonian, William Prescott, whose Conquest of Mexico was published in 1843, and whose concern about the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest ‘lies between every line of his three volumes’, as William Truettner puts it in an essay in ...”

“... the second part of a superb and definitive biography, and by these studies of Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, pioneer volumes in Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s new ‘Historians on Historians’ series. As their resonant names suggest, these men were the very antithesis of poor, cloistered, threadbare ...”

“... then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal match with the French King’s brother, Francois, Duke of Anjou. It ...”

“... of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and professionalism in government, that was probably true. Yet complacency ...”