“... he ironically offered them his condolences for the death of their ancestor Hector. Charting what William James called ‘the proper bounds of lachry-mosity’ is an enterprise which is unlikely to generate unanimity. The same is true of apprehension. At one end of the continuum we have the Grimm Brothers’ Clever Else overwhelmed by the thought of a ...”

“... important friends were wealthy men with a taste for the arts – his neighbour Uvedale Price, Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador at Naples, and the collector Charles Townley. By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first ...”

“... of a fatal case of self-starvation in 1789, in which the victim’s mother was clearly implicated; William Gull’s and Charles Lasegue’s independent recognition of anorexia as a clinical entity in the 1870s, and their delineation of it as a psychological disorder as well as a physiological one. Then, its aetiology refined by Charcot and Janet between 1890 ...”

“... is ‘perhaps allied with religion, perhaps a mystic practice and possibly just another form of Christian Science or plain Hubbardian nonsense’. The following year, embracing what he called the ‘religious angle’, he opened the first church of Scientology in Los Angeles. The electro-psychometer was no longer used as a diagnostic tool but became instead ...”

“... the streets. After the event, radicals took Bellingham to their hearts. At his public execution William Cobbett, looking out from his cell window (he was in for political libel), ‘saw the half-horrified countenances’ of the crowd, the ‘mournful tears’ running down their faces and ‘heard the unanimous blessings’. He ascribed this to their ...”

“... then governing the slave refuge colony of Sierra Leone, Zachary, like his fellow abolitionist William Wilberforce, believed the spread of the Gospel was a much greater cause. Blacks should be free to serve their – that is, his – God, and to take their proper places in the hierarchy of humanity that the evangelicals saw as ‘natural’, and essential ...”

“... and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.’ According to William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), ‘your true Russian’ is notable for humility, love of theory, paralysis of the will, and a complete lack of ‘the healthy moderation of the Anglo-Saxon’. What, Phelps asks, is the ...”

“... the endless gadgets, and the need to clean them or tidy them away. We had come a long way from William Morris’s thinking on household objects, that one should keep nothing that is neither useful nor beautiful, and our house, in the middle of our street, was testament to the ugliness of half-arsed consumption, a Bedlam of miniature wants. Storage ...”

“... ended with her slapping him across the face. The tautness of the final film was due to the young William Wyler, who arrived on the set as director in September 1941. Under his aegis, the male characters faded into the background – earlier scripts had envisaged scenes of Clem and Vin at Dunkirk – while the women of the village moved ...”

“... the real writer, at one point borrowing a metaphor from ‘The Shadow’, a short story by Hans Christian Andersen. In the story, a man’s shadow separates from his body and takes on a life of its own, travelling around and meeting people. It occasionally comes back to visit, each time more assertive, more sophisticated, eventually becoming more real than ...”

“... girl called Bubbles Breedlove, and the coda in which Tony preaches the senseless compromise of ‘Christian atheism’ (an institutionalised bad faith), have the saddening desultoriness of a game with counters that have lost their meaning and ceased to amuse. The chief consolation that remains to Tony is the ‘way with words’ on which other characters ...”

“... finding a place for transcendent values, must be the pursuit of English novelists.’ It is William Golding who comes top here: he has ‘wed his sense of a transcendent evil and good to the fully felt social novel that the English have constructed in their great tradition’. Few people will dissent, I imagine, from this rating of Mr Golding. It must ...”

“... forms’ but sterile imitators of those forms. To argue that Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, William Gaddis and company belong to some contemporary American avant-garde is to rationalise the fact that they have no audience. Karl cites as instances of writers misunderstood in their day the case of Melville, condemned to an obscure life as a customs ...”

“... had been allied to the Orange family since the marriage of Charles’s daughter Mary to the second William of Orange in 1641. William’s death in November 1650, which made possible two decades of republican rule in the Netherlands, was as large an event in Dutch politics as the execution of his father-in-law the previous ...”

“... rights. From time to time, both Democrats and Republicans have claimed him as their own. In 1992, William Jefferson Clinton predictably played the Jefferson card, only to be trumped by Ronald Reagan in his speech to the Republican Convention. Parodying the rebuke which Lloyd Bentsen had delivered to Dan Quayle four years previously, Reagan mocked his own ...”