“... haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... This in turn might go some way to explaining his psychopathic, prurient hatred for Martin Luther King. Hoover was compulsive in his taping and bugging of King’s highly virile private life, and in his campaign to use the tapes for blackmail. He officiated in the twisted plan to send ...”

“... it, forming Socialisme ou barbarie with a congeries of radicals which eventually included C.L.R. James and the Sino-American, Grace Lee Boggs; free of the French Communist Party, he managed to avoid embroilment in the latter’s dizzying volte-fesses, chronicled by Sartre in Les Mains sales. He sided with the Algerian rebels against his adopted homeland and ...”

“... which confiscated a tenth of the annual value of the property of those who had supported the King. Some Major-Generals were harsher than others. Royalists breathed more easily under Major-General Whalley in the Midlands, where insurrection was held to be relatively unlikely and where Whalley had respectable local connections and was ready to mollify ...”

“... dramatically reduced Indian populations and changed the physical environment. It created what James Merrell called ‘the Indian’s New World’, a world as changed and daunting for Indian peoples as it was for Europeans. For Richter, as for Merrell, Indians are as much a people of history as Europeans and Africans are; they find themselves in the middle ...”

“... the employee of a private trading company. Yet, just as Newport was ultimately acting on behalf of James I, so Cortés’s expedition had been made possible by private Spanish financiers. The ‘king’ Powhatan was clearly no Montezuma, and Newport’s attempt to crown him (with a copper crown) ended in farce. His ...”

“... circumstances. Thus the ‘first edition’ (his term) of Deuteronomy, during the reign of King Josiah in the late seventh century BCE, was the Covenant edition, identifying itself frequently as sefer habrit, the Book of the Covenant, and stressing ancient Near Eastern treaty terms for Israel’s relationship with its God. The next recension was the ...”

“... shipwreck, she spent the better part of five years on pilgrimage, while her husband stayed home in King’s Lynn. After Jerusalem she visited Rome, Santiago de Compostela and York, where she fell foul of the archbishop and narrowly escaped being burned as a heretic. At the age of sixty, she made one last pilgrimage, to the Holy Blood of Wilsnack in ...”

“... dispatched, but Cleopatra Selene was raised by Octavian’s sister and eventually married to the king of Mauretania. On 29 August, Octavian became the pharaoh of Egypt.Famous as its dénouement might be, the career of Marcus Antonius is somewhat shadowy. He was born a nobilis, which under the republic meant he had a consul as ancestor: since the expulsion of ...”

“... Like his elder contemporary Henry James, Eça de Queirós belongs to the small and distinguished group of 19th-century novelists who wrote in exile. He was born in 1845 in a remote town of northern Portugal, but spent most of his working life in England and France. He liked to maintain that his novels were fundamentally French, and that he himself was French in everything but his fondness for ballad-singers and cod with onions ...”

“... good manners. The idea that they enjoyed a special relationship with God had a long history, and James I apparently did not feel the least embarrassment in describing himself as the Lord’s vice-gerent on earth. Even as James was lecturing Parliament about the divinity of kings, however, the ideological ground had begun ...”

“... of the heritage itself? The secessionist clergyman Benjamin Palmer, an old friend of pro-slavery James Henley Thornwell, Genovese’s favourite antebellum theologian, put the matter succinctly in 1860: ‘Must I pause to show how [slavery] has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and moulded the very type of our ...”

“... no doubt merely reminded his mentor of the limited facilities for shaving in submarines: but James Joyce’s young man resents his friend’s analysis and calls him a sulphur-yellow liar. We do resent, it seems, having our erotic or quasi-erotic motives explained to us; perhaps not so much because we all feel the explanation to be false, though that ...”

“... at Harvard, that Cambridge was still thought of as the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, both recently deceased, and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at ...”

“... separated, at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ...”