“... and motives of his fellow-lodger’. These words were penned by Robert Latham’s collaborator, William Matthews, who died in 1976. He was a scholar in the old style, not given to trendy assimilation of historic sources into the narratology of modern angst. But his effort to see the diary as something more than ‘full, objective reporting’, a bigger ...”

“... the handlooms of the Bengal weavers, whose delicate silks and muslins were prized all over Europe. William Bentinck, governor of Madras and later governor-general, wrote that ‘the bones of the cotton weavers were bleaching the plains of India.’ Tariffs of 70 per cent and more were imposed on the textiles India produced, and cheap British cottons flooded ...”

“... to the Vaughan affair, and here there’s an intriguing bridge between fact and fiction. In Thomas Hughes’s autobiographical novel, Tom Brown’s affection for the beautiful Arthur sets him wondering whether Arthur has a sister he might marry. In real life ‘Arthur’ was Arthur Stanley (ultimately dean of Westminster), and his sister Catherine ...”

“... more interesting – than you are. Anglophilia showed itself in the magazine’s politics (Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Harold Ross describes him praying for Britain before America’s entry into the war) and its choice of subjects and contributors. Edmund Wilson, reviewing one of Taylor’s novels, adduced it as ‘one more proof that the English ...”

“... in a riot of onomatopoeia when the song was performed as a round. Harris introduces us to William Merle, who between 1337 and 1344 kept a diary of the weather at Driby in Lincolnshire, one of the earliest such records to survive, and to Sir Gawain watching the seasons turn in the anxious year between his first meeting with the Green Knight and the ...”

“... local families – was rapidly replaced by an international economy of paper credit.In his Utopia, Thomas More is introduced to the traveller Raphael Hythlodaeus on the docks at Antwerp. But the utopian tradition in the Low Countries, centred on luilekkerland (‘lazy-delicious-land’), was meatier, and more Antwerpian. In one luilekkerland story written in ...”

“... socks, Woodbines – the mood is ominous. The poem ends with a reference to the death of Edward Thomas. Lewis himself was killed in 1944.Sarah 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 ...”

“... of their new freedom in the economic and political life of the reconstructed Southern States. Thomas Nast’s cartoons depict Negroes with increasing hostility as Northern effectiveness fails, exposing them to the blasts of local intimidation. As E.L. Godkin’s early liberalism turned sour, he and other likeminded publicists not only withdrew their ...”

“... begins, least lightly. His first paragraph is a model: No conquest is free of catastrophe. Duke William came and took what he wanted. And of course there were those who got hurt. But obvious though that is, revisionist historians today dwell less on the changes imposed by the Normans than on what they were content to leave alone. That is not the way it ...”

“... view of life, where action is more important than reaction; and Cohen may also be right that Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigms (syndromes of scientific assumptions, described in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962) does not apply neatly to the Behaviourism revolution, or to psychology as a whole. Kuhn would classify psychology as not being ...”

“... Church, but the claim would be more persuasive did not the teaching vary so greatly. The Gospel of Thomas, probably composed about the middle of the century, consists of short sayings and parables of Jesus, some of them derived from, or at any rate parallel to, those known from the New Testament, others hitherto unknown and including a few which may well be ...”

“... the appropriation of Auschwitz (including Höss himself) by a thick, mainstream American novel, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice: this actually has some reality about it, because it’s pretty sure in its own conventions, corny as these are. Sophie is a dazzlingly beautiful survivor of Auschwitz, and while the pathos of her past is revealed in extended ...”

“... equestrian dash. The three figures about whom Stubbs has most to say, the poets Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew and William Davenant, do to varying degrees answer to that description. Though his book makes no claims to archival discovery, it lights up their writing and brings fresh perception to the ties of friendship ...”

“... England there was nothing. The absence of English Scriptures helps explain the great impact that William Tyndale’s English translations, first of the New Testament and then of substantial parts of the Old, had on the country in the 1520s and 1530s. His New Testaments, printed on the Continent, were bought up by the Bishop of London, who had them burned in ...”

“... by three botanists, each supposedly stumbling on it independently. In 1906, William Bateson, the most forceful champion of Mendel’s work in Britain, dubbed the new science ‘genetics’. Those 34 years of obscurity have fascinated historians of science. Why was such a major advance overlooked for so long? That Mendel published in ...”