“... to ‘the English Literary Happy Family’, as I hope neither do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my ...”

“... library still displayed a relic of this chapter of American progress in the form of the scalp of William Thompson, a settler attacked during a raid in 1867, who had preserved the lopped-off sliver of his head and had it tanned for posterity.Seventeen years after the first Fort Laramie Treaty, a new version was drafted that contains hints of the legal ...”

“... Home in German Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide from 1922 ...”

“... to which were made by the English statistician R.A. Fisher, a eugenicist and a devout Christian who saw biological progress as evidence of God’s active and continuing role in nature, and whose centenary in 1990 was not a significant media event.You could point out that Darwin would have been regarded as a very great naturalist and considerable ...”

“... social history, whose work has focused on poverty, emigration and women’s history; and William Duncan, an expert in family law at Trinity College Dublin and one of the authors of The Hague Children’s Conventions – were tasked with reporting on the way the homes were managed, ‘entrance and exit pathways’ for women and children, mortality ...”

“... his precipitous decline year after year. (His neuro-chemistry is not accessible to biography.) William Styron gave up trying to understand his own collapse, which coincided, roughly speaking, with Levi’s last attack: ‘the very number of hypotheses is testimony to the malady’s all but impenetrable mystery.’ Levi’s death is thus both easy and ...”

“... figurines in the crypt of a Mexican church – for a long moment I’d forgotten Rowe was a devout Christian. Border vigilance had raised the stakes, she went on, attracting new, high-powered Mexican smugglers who looked for wide profit margins (the going rate for a crossing that starts in Guatemala is around $7000). A cottage industry has been transformed ...”

“... revolutionaries of the FLN had religion going for them, not only because they were confronting a Christian colonial power but also as heirs to the al-Islah reform movement. But Gaddafi and his associates had no militant religious banner and organised Islam in Libya was minded to resist them. Pre-empted in the religious sphere by both the Sanussiyya in the ...”

“... for all its well-advertised generational lack of complexes, never rocked the boat in the way its Christian Democrat predecessor in Bonn had done. Since 1991, in fact, there has been no action to compare with Kohl’s unilateral recognition of Slovenia, precipitating the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Merkel has moved successfully to circumvent the will of ...”

“... of Aughrim, about John Leo’s debts, and his run-ins with the owner of the local newspaper, William Hastings. All this and more can be discerned from census returns, court records and newspaper archives. And I imagined things that I couldn’t actually prove. I wondered if, when he was in Dublin (to get married, for example, or to help transport the ...”

“... children, were elaborate cakes and the latest iPhone.She was fond of a quote she’d found from William Golding. ‘I think women are foolish to pretend they are equal to men,’ it said. ‘They are far superior and always have been.’ Most of the women thought this was a bit untrue, but Rania was very much herself. When her brother-in-law Tariq became ...”