“... will fall in love with – and be betrayed by – her uncle’s natural son, the libertine Clement Montgomery.) When the other heroine of the novel, Caroline Ashburn, first comes across Sibella, she is perched like a ‘Wood Nymph’ on a tree stump, with Nina curled in her lap ‘in an attitude of confidence and affection’. Yet the tiny, sure-footed Nina is ...”

“... Collectors’ fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio ...”

“... in Lombardy, where he was living out his days as a pious recluse. The next year, a man called ‘William le Galeys’ was picked up by Edward III’s court as it progressed through northwestern Germany on its way to the imperial court of the Holy Roman Emperor. William also claimed to be Edward II, but only dined at the ...”

“... Eisenhower believed him, or at least had no time for the implications of not believing him. Montgomery and Churchill knew well what Stalin was up to, but the decision was not theirs. On 15 April, General William H. Simpson of the US 9th Army was flown back from the Elbe front to meet General Omar Bradley at ...”

“... and cheerful slaves – was ‘in sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction’. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! – with its gallery of ruthless parvenus and race-fixated slavers – featured ‘one of the most complex, unreadable and uncommunicative prose styles ever to find its way into print’. It soon found its way out ...”

“... in the 1960s recordings, though, is radio’s ability to lay bare what’s not said. Field Marshal Montgomery sounds lonely, wistful and odd; the twenty-year-old Cliff Richard sounds painfully young, schoolboyish and eager to please. By the 1970s, however, Plomley’s questioning had begun to seem creaky. To the growing frustration of a cohort of radio ...”

“... German troops would cluster in the wrong place. The plan extended to undercover pigeons and a fake Montgomery played by a ‘boozy’ Australian actor with dyed sideburns, who made himself visible in Gibraltar to give the impression that Monty was on his way to North Africa. Were it not for this ‘web of deception’, as Macintyre puts it, the Normandy ...”

“... reaped a prodigious annual return. H.G. Wells said of one of John Jacob’s great-grandchildren, William Waldorf Astor, that he extracted rents ‘as effectively as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit’, though by Wells’s day spending rather than getting had become the most visible Astor occupation. With an exaggerated version of the anglophilia common to ...”

“... source. My bias, which I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the ...”

“... trails partly broken by earlier scholars, traces these in detail. The erudite merchant Prosper Montgomery Wetmore took home Margaret Cavendish’s Philosophical Letters, which Lamb’s friend James Kenney had not only borrowed but taken to live with him at Versailles (Lamb had to make a special trip to recover it). The ‘Conant’ who picked up ...”

“... Bannatyne Manuscript of 1568 contains six poems that are his, or have been ascribed to him. But William Ringler has pointed out that five of these poems are later additions to the manuscript, and the sixth is ascribed, apparently in a later hand, simply to ‘Montgomery’ – a sufficiently common name, and the ...”

“... to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my ...”

“... authority. It is a tale of two leaders: Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and his adopted son Matt Garth (Montgomery Clift). Dunson is the organiser of a massive cattle drive, starting out in south-west Texas and heading for a railroad in the Midwest. But the kinder and gentler Matt takes over when the cowhands grow unhappy with Dunson’s increasingly tyrannical ...”

“... treatment of religion and a Harlem only barely understood south of 125th Street, was compared to William James and William Faulkner. In Paris in 1950 Baldwin had read A Portrait of the Artist and its hero’s story was not lost on him. The need to do battle with religion and his own oppressed nation, some of whose members ...”

“... on screen, and stopped hiring men who were bald or had acne. (According to the memoir of William Sullivan, one of his deputies, an agent who lost his hair after he’d been hired wouldn’t be sacked, but would be ‘kept out of the public eye’.)The misleadingly named ‘crime records division’ of the bureau became a public relations ...”