“... any given household and the kinds of gift they could demand for their service. By contrast, William de Longchamp, lord chancellor in the late 12th century, tried to improve his public image by writing his own praise poems and paying French musicians to sing them in the streets.Medieval minstrels left few written traces, and the references that do appear ...”

“... about its origins and bring alive again the inquirers and artists who have gone before him. William Borlase was the vicar of Ludgvan in Penwith. At 52 he felt ‘his energies starting to dim’ but then, in May 1748, he ‘happened to bump into two distinguished antiquarians’ – also parsons, needless to say – and what he told them about local ...”

“... of seeing that treachery is a complex and uncertain matter – except during the excitement of the hunt and kill. Anthony Blunt’s actions in the last war and afterwards probably constitute a particularly difficult instance of political disloyalty, calling for unusual delicacy of judgment. The facts would have to be absolutely definite first – especially in ...”

“... they powered Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Morte D’Arthur, created the Victorian vogue for William Morris’s ‘Defence of Guenevere’ (1858) and Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1859-85), and returned in T.H. White’s Once and Future King (1958) and the Disney movie based on it in 1963, with a dozen successors including John Boorman’s 1981 film ...”

“... grain of his natural genius. He did not want to write the sort of ‘unmisgiving’ poetry (Leigh Hunt’s remarkable adjective) which came, with help from Shakespeare, like the leaves to the tree. If Keats had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the ...”

“... and write books, it must have seemed like a good idea to pass them off as a by-product of the hunt, like a yarn overheard in the boot room.The thirty-year gap between her early novels and Good Behaviour (there was an unsuccessful play in 1961, which gave her years of writer’s block) meant that she had no readerly expectations to live up to. Most readers ...”

“... Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own jokes. Amiable images, devised no doubt to lure us into a placidly ...”

“... by warfare within his own ranks and confronted by a broad alliance of political opponents. Can William Hague draw any comfort from the experience of his similarly beleaguered predecessor Andrew Bonar Law, a scarcely visible figure in the pantheon of Tory leaders? What is best known about him is that he is ‘unknown’. Lord Blake’s celebrated ...”

“... or social oppression, but it has been the subject of numerous novels. One of the greatest is by William Faulkner, who created the sin-bearing pariah Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932). Among other malign habits, Joe uses his ambiguous skin colour to sleep with prostitutes without paying. ‘One night it did not work. He rose from the bed and told the ...”

“... was never more of a disconnect between an honourable military officer and a reporter on the hunt,’ Hersh writes. His interlocutor ‘saw Calley as an aberration: I thought he was part of a hell of a story that needed to be told.’ The hunt​ for Lieutenant William Calley led ...”

“... for several months, until in mid-October another fast-tracked Westminster committee produced the Hunt Report into policing in Northern Ireland. Baron Hunt, a retired military officer, made 47 recommendations, including the disarming of the RUC and the abolition of the Ulster Special Constabulary (‘B Specials’), a ...”

“... Sound and the Fury for the sheer pleasure of yet another reading. None of this is to propose that William Faulkner was a non-writer. He was a richly gifted writer and there are times when he writes with real genius. He is keenly observant, and when he so wishes can be stereoscopically graphic. He gives us the intimate feel of an old banker’s run-down bank ...”

“... or should own it, persisted. The mart’s apotheosis came in September 1847 with the sale of ‘William Shakespeare’s home’ in Stratford-on-Avon. This was, on the one hand, ‘a freehold plot with a cottage and attached public house’ and, on the other, as the Athenaeum put it, ‘a dwelling which has been glorified’ by Shakespeare’s ‘familiar ...”

“... in the Eighties. Saunders’s account of Partisan and its editor, the insufferably pretentious William Phillips – in a chapter she calls ‘Cultural Nato’ – is devastating. Far from being independent, PR was on the CIA payroll via front organisations like the Farfield Foundation. Before that, it had been carried financially by none other than Henry ...”

“... remembers that there was lax discipline among them. There was also friction between Lieutenant William ‘Rusty’ Calley, the only man to serve time for My Lai, and the company’s commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, even though the two shared a violent animosity towards the Vietnamese. Within a few weeks of arriving in Asia, both were involved in ...”