“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Black Legend, which characterised Spain as a country of cruel and unenlightened Catholic zealots. Thomas Eakins visited Spain in 1869, followed later by John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt and others, bringing back visual and written descriptions of a country they thought both colourful and charming. The ‘Spanish craze’ reached epidemic proportions in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... at the block, and the headsman had to pin her down. Even the more sedate accounts agree that, like Thomas Cromwell, she was hacked about by a second-string executioner. Higginbotham’s narrative begins with this bungled beheading – so either the jacket designer was in the dark about the contents, or someone at her publisher has a mordant sense of ...”

“... Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders ...”

“... the first person to articulate an elephant’s skeleton, was the younger brother of William Hunter. Both men were pioneering teachers of anatomy. John set up the museum to house his anatomical collection, which has been called his ‘great unwritten book’. Other such collections were either mere taxonomies or else forms of entertainment ...”

“... textile industry for three generations, and Edward expanded the family business by partnering with William Scofield, his Harvard classmate and Florence’s brother. A leading wool manufacturer, Edward bought the fanciest house in town (his son would call it an ‘orgulous pile’) and a steam yacht (which his wife promptly made him sell) before dying of ...”

“... Unusual too in a moral philosopher, Williams did not seek to have the Last Word. Writing about Thomas Nagel’s book of that name, he couldn’t but agree that there comes a point at which we have to accept that to encourage thinking locally or ‘thickly’ about ethics, thinking about what the options are for us ‘now and around here’, rests on a ...”

“... with the authority of the Apostle Bartholomew.’ Others thought the Buddha a decayed memory of Thomas the Apostle, who was said to have gone to India after the Resurrection. Some assumed the Buddhists were a branch of the Nestorian Christians who, exiled from Constantinople in the fifth century, had fled to Persia and later flourished in Tang Dynasty China ...”

“... 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 ...”