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“... either by silence, rehab, cameo appearances, adverts, jail or, if they’re lucky, B-movies. William Friedkin made The French Connection and The Exorcist and was nominated for several Oscars before climbing to the top of his personal godhead and leaping off. Last year he directed Episode 9 in the eighth season of the TV show CSI: Crime Scene ...”

“... Kenya’s​ government is in crisis. In May, President William Ruto introduced a controversial new finance bill, which proposed higher duties on basic goods such as bread, vegetable oil and sugar, as well as an ‘eco-levy’ that would drive up the cost of sanitary towels and other items. Ruto said the taxes would raise a much needed additional £2 billion in government revenues ...”

“... a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand, And hooked a berry to a thread; And when white moths were on the wing, And moth-like stars were flickering out, I dropped the berry in a stream And caught a little silver trout. If the trout is a poem, the wand is knowledge of the land and people: it’s beautiful and apparently artlessly simple, but ...”

“... of those yawning divides of style by which teenagers define themselves. We wore T-shirts of the White Light/White Heat album cover, which could not have existed when the album was originally released. Mere mention of liking the Grateful Dead was grounds for ostracism. In the punk rock schema, the Velvets were Papa (and ...”

“... in World War Two, his distinguishing physical feature is a ‘dissident’ thatch of prematurely white hair. A brilliant rhetorician and provocateur of student action, Marquis is a maverick politically, having left the Party in 1956. The founder of Thought and Action, he has lost control of the journal to a younger clique of more fashionable ...”

“... realism in fact depends on a rather cosy kind of fantasy, verging on self-parody in Scoop, where William Boot of Boot Magna Hall, and his column ‘Lush Places’ in the Daily Beast, bear an odd resemblance to the goings-on in another of Waugh’s lifelong favourites, The Wind in the Willows. Waugh’s Catholic and hierarchic nostalgia for the Great Good ...”

“... an element of the standing critical wisdom. Many of his former antagonists have now moved to what William James thought of as the third phase in the assimilation of a threatening new idea. First they said it was absurd, then that it was peripheral, now they want to claim it as their own creation. So Bloom has in a sense won his battle. In doing so, he may ...”

“... Bismarck meant that capital punishment was eventually retained in the new German Empire, although William I’s Protestant conscience led him to commute all death sentences during the 1870s. What changed the situation was Bismarck’s exploitation of an attempt on the Emperor’s life in 1878. This became the pretext for an anti-socialist law; it also allowed ...”

“... here,’ he chided, ‘you mustn’t park here.’ Attendance wasn’t brisk, but then Sir William Burrell insisted the location should be remote, as far as possible from pollution. A resourceful magpie of a ship-owner who disposed of his fleet at the outbreak of World War One and took to collecting everything from Chinese pottery through armour to ...”

“... father) though I do not wish to wish these thingsFrom the wide window towards the granite shoreThe white sails still fly seaward, seaward flyingUnbroken wingsLennard writes:‘Ash-Wednesday’ ends with the plea ‘Suffer me not to be separated/ /And let my cry come unto Thee.’; and that cry is ‘(Bless me father)’. The lunulae enabled Eliot to record and ...”

“... On 19 October 1844 the overweight William Makepeace Thackeray – if his travel diary tells the truth – laboriously climbed the Great Pyramid of Cheops and pasted up banners advertising Punch, ‘thus introducing civilisation to Egypt’. The Egyptians put up with this sort of thing. Thomas Holloway, the great pill-maker, is supposed to have introduced eupepsia to Egypt by advertising his product from the same vantage-point ...”

“... life to the random and endless shopping lists catalogued in his numerous logbooks: ‘a blue and white china pap-cup; a poisoned dart in red bag; a pilgrim bottle; a pair of spectacles in a brass case; another pair of large round spectacles; some wooden scales; a skeleton warrior; a broken, painted thermometer ’. Wellcome himself is absent from much of ...”

“... there is not a single bathroom under one of those damp thatched roofs.’ Lane’s biographer, William Holtz, suggests that Lane rewrote her mother’s books out of duty, but also to show off. Her agent remembered Wilder’s drafts as the narration of a ‘fine old lady … sitting in a rocking chair and telling a story chronologically but with no benefit ...”

“... bypass round Locke. It concentrated instead on a set of debates among such obscure antiquaries as William Petyt, James Tyrrell, William Atwood and Robert Brady. Late 17th-century Englishmen, it transpired, were less concerned with a hypothesised original contract between monarch and people than with the question of whether ...”

“... Charles on a brief excursion to the fringes of the Kalahari and became the godfather of Prince William. These elevated contacts won him favourable, even awestruck publicity, though Private Eye regularly featured him uttering some New Age balderdash at which Prince Charles would murmur: ‘How true.’ Fortunately for him, no journalist discovered that as ...”