“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Moss’s new novel is set in a lochside cabin park in the Trossachs. The poem behind its title is William Watson’s ‘The Ballad of Semmerwater’, about a city lost beneath a lake. But Lewis’s poem seems truer to its spirit, as rain keeps falling, ‘day after day of it, torrential’, ‘ostentatious’, ‘drilling the ground and churning up ...”

“... knowing the origin of the substance in front of you, inorganic slime can often seem part of what William Ian Miller, in The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), called ‘the organic world of generative rot … life soup, fecundity itself’. For most of history, as Lehoux points out, spontaneous generation was a fact, not a theory. The distinction between muddy slime ...”

“... change. Every memorialist of Ireland’s ancient past, from Crofton Croker to George Petrie, Sir William Wilde, John O’Donovan, Eugene Curry and a host of others has issued this same warning. What you see now will soon be visible no more; what you see now is only the remnant of what once was. There is, of course, a great deal of truth in this. All ...”

“... some of the blame had to rest with the Innu themselves. The response typified that of many white Canadians. The deaths, the alienation, the despair were lamentable, but were hardly deliberate policy. The plight of the Innu was the result of their inability to adapt to the new world. How could it be otherwise? After all, the United Nations regularly ...”

“... On 16 October 1859, a white anti-slavery agitator called John Brown led 21 followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths, but Brown had far grander hopes for his new enterprise – to start an insurrection across the South ...”

“... the United States. There are obvious historical reasons why this should be so. Until 1776, most white inhabitants of the Thirteen Colonies shared religious and political ideas, patterns of consumerism, trade networks, secular culture, war efforts, as well as a king, with the people across the Atlantic. Consequently, Colonial American historians have long ...”

“... as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like Andy Burnham, Chris Grayling, Nick Herbert and Nick Clegg, who went ...”

“... was 18 years old.’ Later in the day, Houston encounters a ‘crew-cut man in his forties with a white towel hitched under his belly and a cigarette clamped between his front teeth’. This is Colonel Sands, a messianic CIA officer and veteran of the Second World War, who drinks too much and takes an unusual and obsessive interest in the tunnels that ...”

“... most of all, its ground game for taking power.’ ‘Diagonalism,’ as Klein says, is the word William Callison and Quinn Slobodian have used to characterise these new alliances, ‘born in part from transformations in technology and communication’ and ‘generally arcing towards far-right beliefs’, while also contesting ‘conventional monikers of ...”

“... On my little TV, where the picture was jumpy at first, was Jack Kerouac. He was sitting up at a white piano, and Steve Allen tinkled away at the keys. Kerouac is very clean, very neat, but he looks nervous. Allen is smug. He’s a polyester-clad uncle sitting at the piano. ‘You nervous?’ says Allen. ‘Naaah,’ blows Kerouac, and in answer to the next ...”