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“... were suggesting. Monmouth voted that year for the Bill to exclude Charles’s brother James from the throne, with obvious hopes of becoming king himself. He protested that his reason for so voting was that his father’s life was in danger, causing the king to remark: ‘The kiss of Judas!’ Dedicating his play Tyrannic Love to Monmouth, Dryden ...”

“... was a case forty years old, but increasingly the emphasis was on topicality. On 6 September 1602, William Haughton received an advance for a play about the killing of a Lincolnshire vicar just eight days earlier. With this move towards currency comes a change of source material. The Arden authors took their story from the respectable pages of Holinshed’s ...”

“... in fact, unable to produce any examples of heretical thought except an errant bishop in France. (William Forbes, who has been casually labelled Arminianist by some modern historians, seems to have been imbued with medieval Augustinianism.) ‘Arminian’ was a useful term of abuse and, along with accusations of incest and drunkenness, could be fastened on ...”

“... spectacular car crash that wrecked his face. There are three kinds of classic American crash: the James Dean, Eddie Cochran legend-sealer; the Bob Dylan at Woodstock disaster turned into an opportunity for reinvention; and the sweet Gene Vincent long martyrdom. Clift could have been another James Dean. Instead he was ...”

“... their charm, like credits in early films which “introduce” Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. But they didn’t in the end quite merit selection.’) The book is organised thematically, and if it isn’t immediately clear why a piece in praise of cats comes under ‘Religion, Politics and Philosophy’ instead of, say, ‘Autobiography and ...”

“... came Eric, born 1883 (according to the family tree) or 1884 (according to the timeline); and William, born 1884 (family tree) or 1886 (timeline). A pair of quantum children, impossible to pin down! The journey between continents took place in 1892 (timeline) or 1893 (according to the ship’s manifest quoted). Hinton himself died in 1904 (family tree) or ...”

“... human nature to Dickens’s surprisingly thoughtful reflections on 1789, 1830 and 1848, and from William Doyle’s opening attempt to divine the ruling principles of the Revolution at one end of the book to Norman Hampson’s engagingly self-mocking attempt to draw out its lessons at the other. But a good many of the essays are sustainedly interesting, and ...”

“... his special friend and constant adviser, the former advertising mogul he made director of the CIA, William Casey. Casey and the gang of right-wing fanatics he quickly promoted to the White House were obsessed with the clandestine. They didn’t think much of elected politicians, and preferred to carry out their policies behind the backs of Congress and the ...”

“... Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to the inhabitants of ...”

“... narrator’s tone remains, in keeping with his personality, resolutely Apollonian. The novel is William Beckwith’s account of summer 1983, during which he was ‘riding high on sex and self-esteem – it was my time, my grande époque.’ Will is 25, from a recently aristocratic family (his grandfather was ennobled for his services as Director of Public ...”

“... her book The ‘Shepheards Nation’, in which she shows Spenser’s literary heirs George Wither, William Browne and the MP Christopher Brooke co-ordinating political with poetic pressure on the Crown at moments of political turmoil in the 1620s. Or there is 1667, when Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter, and plays by Sir Robert Howard and the Earl of ...”

“... kung fu movies and Oprah Winfrey.’ Wright introduces us to a cast that includes Corporal Harold James Trombley, a 19-year-old who sits in the back of a Humvee ‘waiting all day for permission to fire his machine gun’. And when he does fire, the thrill of the fight represents a kind of ecstasy for him. Wright reports that ‘every time’ Trombley ‘gets ...”

“... here are children; sometimes they have been seen by children, too, as in the case of a certain William, who was sent away from his home in Apt after a series of violent incidents and died in 1211 after a brawl. On several nights not long after his death, he appeared, naked except for some rags, to his 11-year-old girl cousin, who had been very fond of ...”

“... in whose head an infinity of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; ...”

“... are more often yet another stumbling-block for the seeker of sexual free spirits in the period. James Mill’s belief in the felicific calculus, and disdain for conventional morality, did not budge him one inch from an extreme austerity in sexual ethics (nor from marital exploitativeness: his wife was an unloved ‘drudge’ who bore him ten ...”