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“... hung over the spout, and a cup stood on the drainer, next to a pile of magazines from Horizon and Thomas Cook. The water hadn’t gone near them. ‘Do you want anything from in here?’ I shouted through. There was no answer. I put my head round. She was sleeping. The next Tuesday was the second of January and Mrs McFarlane said could I come over early and ...”

“... that Bill Gates earned more than the lowest-paid 40 per cent of Americans combined. ‘Once,’ Thomas Frank writes in his terrific book One Market under God :2 Americans imagined that economic democracy meant a reasonable standard of living for all – that freedom was only meaningful once poverty and powerlessness had been ...”

“... that Malvolio’s defects spring from his own hypocrisy and self-love. They are not, as Sir Andrew Aguecheek wants to believe, associated with a particular religious and political alignment in Elizabethan England. Maria’s scrupulousness here about an easy misuse of the term ‘Puritan’ would seem to be Shakespeare’s own. Although critics often ...”

“... hand at work in a series of episodes that preceded the outbreak of the War of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the penultimate royal governor of Massachusetts, described him as ‘that Machiavelli of chaos’, responsible for stirring up anti-government sentiment along the Atlantic seaboard. Writing under more than thirty pseudonyms in the colonial ...”

“... sake of a joke about fame on social media: ‘Yes, just for a day, everybody had wanted a piece of Andrew Fairbanks. Although, after the sharks had finished with him, there weren’t that many pieces left.’The criminal mastermind behind the murders uses an alias, François Loubet, and communicates mostly by email, taking advantage of every new technological ...”

“... Dylan Thomas’s​ foredoomed premature death feels intrinsic to his late romanticism, part of what made him the ‘Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’, as he labelled himself. But he could have escaped the legend to which he had devoted such energies. As Paul Ferris’s excellent biography established some time back, while Thomas was certainly in a bad way, his death was down to a medical blunder ...”

“... the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”

“... which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town of Lawrence, but ridiculed Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in unusually personal terms, alluding to his speech impediment. ‘He shows an incapacity of accuracy,’ Sumner declared. ‘He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.’ Brooks was Butler’s second cousin ...”

“... a hospital, possibly dying, because someone pushed him off a high roof. The man, Kimura, played by Andrew Koji, feels that his neglect of his son allowed this to happen. He has been informed that the person who pushed the boy is on the train; he is out to kill this person, or to go as far towards this end as his depression and alcoholism will allow. He ...”

“... is like reading occasional passages from a Modernist masterpiece: like reading a cut-up of Thomas Mann or a disarranged Robert Musil. In Nijinsky’s darkest hour we can see the outline of a very slow, modern-seeming death: he doodles the Great War in four volumes. In the end there is only a build-up of losses in his otherwise sparse room – loss of ...”

“... be cleaner, more self-referential, more knowing or more minxy. In relation to Hollywood, Thomas Mann (from his perch at Pacific Palisades) had pronounced Isherwood ‘starry-eyed’, but Isherwood had learned more than Mann about gay sexual deportment. Carrying the Weimar spirit with him, writing with vitality, irony and humour, Isherwood deserves ...”

“... a load of nearly 800 lbs. In 1721, a judge at the Old Bailey sentenced two supposed highwaymen, Thomas Cross and William Spiggot, to be pressed for refusing to submit a plea. The prisoner, he instructed, ‘shall be laid upon the bare ground [and] upon his body shall be laid so much Iron and Stone as he can bear and more … until he die’. The mere sight ...”

“... entitled to be known as ‘moral managers’ to encompass a much larger group: William Battie, Thomas Arnold, William Perfect, Joseph Mason Cox, Francis Willis, Benjamin Faulkner, William Pargeter, Thomas Bakewell, William Hallaran, and others. But immediately problems arise. Of these figures, only the ...”

“... relations in the United States. Despite the twists and turns of official policy – from Thomas Jefferson’s efforts to assimilate Indians by teaching them to farm (even though they had been doing so for centuries), to Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal, Grant’s ‘peace policy’ and Roosevelt’s Indian New ...”