“... wilt. The president’s base demands unwavering fealty to the anti-abortion movement, and the Bush camp has obliged, even to the extent of fabricating an association between abortion and breast cancer. An online fact sheet from the National Cancer Institute that discounted such a link was removed in June 2002 to mollify anti-abortionists in Congress. In its ...”

“... In August 1937, Les Tebbutt, a 17-year-old boy from Northampton, attended a Boys’ Brigade summer camp in Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast. One night, as he and his friends made their way back through the camp after a trip to Butlin’s Pleasure Fair and a fish and chip supper, he noticed a ‘nice girl’ watching him from one of the caravans ...”

“... reaped a prodigious annual return. H.G. Wells said of one of John Jacob’s great-grandchildren, William Waldorf Astor, that he extracted rents ‘as effectively as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit’, though by Wells’s day spending rather than getting had become the most visible Astor occupation. With an exaggerated version of the anglophilia common to ...”

“... by the Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards Elizabeth, mindful of the role history may have in store for her. Shardlake is retained as one of her lawyers. Now 47, he is lonely, world-weary, and bored of drawing up conveyances and wills (perhaps ...”

“... covert battlefields, JSOC hunted real and imagined enemies of the US. Its bases in Iraq (including Camp Nama) and Afghanistan (including Bagram Air Force Base) were infamous for the mass detention, torture and unexplained deaths of civilians. In a whistleblower report to Human Rights Watch, a US sergeant described a small room in ...”

“... in 1099, the new Christian population inhabited only one-quarter of the city, and then sparsely. William of Tyre says that in the early years of the 12th century a man might live in the centre of Jerusalem and yet be too far from his neighbours to find help when thieves broke in. Sixty years later the whole Christian population of the kingdom amounted to ...”

“... Immediately Mère Ubu, his wife, urges her ‘dirty old man’, who has somehow become aide-de-camp to King Wenceslas of Poland, to seize the crown. Unlike Macbeth, Ubu needs no convincing, because he has no conscience: in Ubu cocu (‘cuckolded’), a sequel to the play, he even flushes a character named Conscience down the toilet. This Super-Id – Jarry ...”

“... it has always been suspected he didn’t do much more in Jordan than attend a students’ summer camp with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine before the real fighting started. He was the Venezuelan rich kid straight out of the Kensington crammer his mother sent him to – Carol Thatcher went there too. ‘He is not as clever as he thinks or ...”

“... J.M. Dent to illustrate a two-volume edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, conceived in the style of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, enabled Beardsley to give up his deadly day job as an office clerk, only to find the quest for the Holy Grail almost as constraining. The endless knights and ladies bored him; something odder and darker was emerging from the ...”

“... all these and others, though clearly different, are unimaginable without Pound, early Eliot, William Carlos Williams and perhaps Wallace Stevens as forerunners. This is the main stream of modern American poetry. In England the picture is very different. Pound is grudgingly acknowledged, distrusted, kept at a distance. Eliot holds his place, but not the ...”

“... piece written by Davie as a very young Observer reporter. It incorporates Raymond, Beaverbrook’s camp valet who would stamp his foot and say, ‘Oh, we are being difficult today, Lord!’, the current mistress, Marie-Edmée Escarra, later dismissed for drink, and a lethargic, affable, fat Lord Rosebery. They talk newspapers – the Observer is a good ...”

“... to know which peril to invoke, which would pay off best. In 1893 the prolific literary adventurer, William le Queux (sometime Honorary Consul for San Marino), published The Great War England in 1897, in which a Franco-Russian army invaded Britain, and followed it in 1905 with The Invasion of 1910, this time with jack-booted Prussians as the aggressors. This ...”

“... Gothic novels, all resolutely supportive of the rights of women, appeared throughout the 1790s. William Beckford wrote the Orientally-inspired Vathek (1786) when he was 21. Like Horace Walpole, author of the pioneering Gothic extravaganza The Castle of Otranto (1764), Beckford combined an interest in literature with a determination to revive a Gothic style ...”

“... The guests include the composer Miklós Rózsa, two leading actors from Fedora (Marthe Keller and William Holden), and Al Pacino, who is visiting Keller, his girlfriend. The conversation turns to the curious absence of Nazis in postwar Germany, and one of the German guests remembers a line from Wilder’s film One, Two, Three. Asked what he did in the war, a ...”

“... information about life at Winchester, where Empson’s companions included Richard Crossman, William Hayter, John Sparrow and other future grandees. It was, as he later remarked, ‘a ripping education’, a first-class ticket for life. The next stop was Cambridge, by means of a scholarship to Magdalene. At this optimum moment of intellectual purity he ...”