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“... the American colonials, the Indians were, as the historian Colin Calloway has put it, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, ‘the vicious pawns of a tyrannical king’. From the perspective of Westminster, the colonials were ungrateful rogue subjects who provoked needless border clashes that strained the Treasury, which had already been exhausted on their behalf in ...”

“... and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a Presbyterian parsonage. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, from which these titbits come, provides further unwitting refutations of its own project, which is to fix American writers in their proper locales: ‘It ...”

“... who had grown up to think himself mentally superior to others of his kind; his younger brothers, William and Algernon, shared his sense of special merit gone unrewarded by the world. The brothers kept up a triangular correspondence in which they exhorted each other to become more practical, cheered each other on, communed in low spirits and shared ...”

“... years before the Battle of Waterloo. As a teenager, through the influence of his elder brother, Thomas, himself a gifted artist and architect, Paul Sandby was taken on as a military draftsman for the Board of Ordnance, producing reliable maps for use in the subjugation of the Highlands. By the time of his death, his astonishing industry had earned him many ...”

“... been, to say nothing of many a lesser figure. In what might be called the peripheral stakes Dylan Thomas and even David Jones have had more attention in some quarters – in the case of Dylan Thomas, with a wild publicity which has had little enough to do with his work. MacDiarmid, it is true, has had a share of irrelevant ...”

“... too by the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616. Some time around 1614 the Christ Church academic Thomas Goffe wrote for student performance an English version of the Oresteia that is largely composed of near quotations from Hamlet. Its Orestes, the ur-detector of his father’s murder by his mother’s second husband, even carries the bones of the slain ...”

“... the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about law.’ Next to Clarence Thomas, Scalia is the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court. Kagan is a Democrat and, we’re told, a liberal. Was she including herself in this claim? If so, how exactly has Scalia influenced her? If not, what does she think of his influence on ...”

“... me in his fine, strong arms’ etc), whereas sex with Shelley’s long-time friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg was quite revolting (‘He slobbered!’) Rather more soberly, Holmes in 1992 seems to have exorcised his own Shelleyan ghosts by writing a radio play about the last weeks at Casa Magni, that beach-house dangerously close to the sea at San ...”

“... by feeding the insatiable hunger of the US military. DuPont was founded in 1802 at the behest of Thomas Jefferson to manufacture ‘black powder’ (a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal) for the army. Over the next hundred years it specialised in gunpowder and explosives, until diversifying in the early 20th century into the production of other ...”

“... and almost entirely without point. Without point, that is, unless you really want to know that Thomas Wolfe rented a cottage in Boothbay Harbor in July 1929 or that Rex Stout wrote four short stories in a boarding-house in Burlington, Vermont or that in Bridgewater, Connecticut on 1 July, 1949 ‘Van Wyck Brooks and his wife moved to a house on Main Street ...”

“... kept his plans in his head. Who, then, was this critical young ensign? He was the third son of William Aitchison, who had an estate at Musselburgh, East Lothian. Only with reluctance did he agree to enter the Army and allow his father to purchase an ensign’s commission in the Third Regiment of Guards, later the Scots Guards. At 19, he served in the siege ...”

“... On 20 July 1943 the Polish artist Jonasz Stern was executed along with hundreds of other Jews of the Lwow ghetto by SS machine-gun fire. He awoke from a faint to find himself alive, buried under the corpses of the entire neighbourhood, covered in other people’s blood and excrement, the only survivor on Janowski Street. Two of the books reviewed here are about survivors, people who turned right instead of left, ran instead of lingering or lingered instead of running, those who met kindly Polish peasants or had ‘good faces’ – did not look Jewish, that is to say – individuals who survived, crazily, randomly, inexplicably, when everybody else, not just their families but neighbours, associates at work, team-mates, local shopkeepers, their whole world, was murdered ...”

“... by the million to disease. The disappearance of branch railway lines is also mourned, with Edward Thomas providing the requiem for the Adlestrops of the English ‘heartland’. Change and decay are not entirely matters of regret. The comfortable appearance of most present-day villages is a source of consolation. Richard Muir considers that the majority of ...”

“... is coaxingly familiar. It didn’t matter to Keats that Chatterton’s spurious versifying priest, Thomas Rowley, was a fiction. What he admired was the result, a revivifying of English style with plum Anglo-Saxonisms. Motion needs us to believe in Dr Tabor’s historicity for the sake of the literary debate that is the novella’s point. But to make the ...”

“... Thomas Hardy, it is said, believed the history of humanity could be written in six words: ‘They lived, they suffered, they died.’ As a historical account this was more than adequate. It depicted change over time, contained a point of view, and encapsulated a universally applicable lesson. What detail the story lacked could be supplied by readers, each in their own way ...”