“... to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the incurably litigious Lord Alfred Douglas. Edward Thomas was devoted to him. John Masefield drank claret with him at teatime as they sang sea shanties together in Ransome’s mother’s kitchen. And Ransome took to most people; he was not choosy. In fact, he was inclined to instant and lasting hero worship from ...”

“... to God. Then tea. Then bed.Sharp was the main inspiration for the title character of Sweet William, a multi-tasker in the sex department. I thought this novel her ‘sunniest’ when it was published in 1975. Yet it ends in loss and chaos. Bainbridge effects an extraordinary trick of the light: the gloomy bits of plotting are scrambled together, so ...”

“... Man on His Horse’ and ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ (whose original title, ‘A Muse for William Maynard’, signals its origins in a relationship with an American presumably met during his spell as a graduate student at Princeton in 1935) were possibly the poems that led Ashbery to assume Prince was gay. This assumption was strengthened when a ...”

“... who wrestled him to the ground were: ‘Did I get him, did I get the king?’ His defence counsel Thomas Erskine, the Whig MP who had faced down Pitt’s government in the treason trials of 1794, disputed none of the facts but argued for dismissal even so. Hadfield had been under the illusion that he was God’s instrument, and that by killing the king (and ...”

“... schmoozed Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when they happened to be ...”

“... a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William Baranès, it anticipates the Guillaume Dustan to come: the pointed mention of his prestigious schooling; the importance of cultivating ‘a look’ (often imported from America); the fear of being consigned to a particular identity or sphere (either the ...”

“... rooms miraculously transformed into gallery spaces. Finally, a particularly eccentric outpost, Thomas Hirschhorn’s plywood and packing tape temple in honour of Georges Bataille, was erected in the middle of a low-income housing project.Documenta, whose original mission had been to celebrate Germany’s new postwar identity and the transnational role of ...”

“... inspired by the transcendent moment when the main character, Binx, observes someone who might be William Holden on the streets of New Orleans. Is he the real thing, or a ghost, a technological anticipation of holography, or just the manifestation of an awareness that such gods as Holden had become axiomatic, as much a model for American manhood as Johnny ...”

“... to living in a slum, and delivered his lectures in a tattered tailcoat. One of his supporters was Thomas Wakley, the editor of the Lancet, who in 1833 sent a shorthand writer to take down sixty comparative anatomy lectures given by Grant, and proceeded to publish them at the rate of one a week. In the course of two lectures on the osteology of birds, Grant ...”

“... was partly based on this episode. Improbably enough, one of the Wager’s sailors was called William Robinson Cruzoe – if he hadn’t deserted ship before it sailed, there might have been a real-life Crusoe among those marooned in the South Seas.Many of the Wager’s survivors later published detailed accounts of their experiences – for profit, to ...”

“... caution to the wind, and it is the Mendelians whom Radick has in his sights, first and foremost William Bateson (1861-1926) of Cambridge. The bulk of the book is given over to the controversy that raged between Bateson and W.F.R. Weldon (1860-1906) of University College London and later Oxford, and between their allies, over the interpretation and ...”

“... Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soar, Olena Stiazhkina, Vera ...”

“... about Kurt Cobain in ‘About a Boy’, and elsewhere referenced the deaths of two of her mentors, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The sleeve of Gung Ho (2000) was the first not to feature her own portrait, replacing it with an old snapshot of her late father. She seemed to be securing some kind of future by assessing her past (a not uncommon manoeuvre ...”

“... can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical pretensions above his station of the cross. ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’ – this ...”

“... What kept them going? Many sailors referred to comradeship as their finest memory of the Navy. William ‘Jock’ Batters (Plumber First Class) wrote in his unpublished memoir: When a sailor ‘belonged’ to a ship his main loyalty was to his ship and his mates. If they endured enough together, his family came second. How other can you explain the ...”