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“... of the Vikings’ leader. Moving on 300 years, Williams tells of the fairly notorious William de Braos, the Lord of Brecon in King John’s time: he was said to be always prating of God and putting on pious airs, but he invited the leading Welsh princes to a party at Abergavenny and killed them all, sending men out afterwards to kill their wives ...”

“... Remarks considered by the French censor to be anti-French and pro-German in letters by his friend William Slater Brown, and Cummings’s staunch refusal to dissociate himself from them, or even to say that he ‘hated the Boche’, resulted in their being incarcerated together for three months while the possibility that they were spies was investigated. The ...”

“... 19th century by Edward Watkin of the Southeastern Railway Company and his partner and engineer, William Low. Despite the success of the great Alpine tunnels – Saint-Gotthard, Simplon, Mont Cenis – it is doubtful that Watkin and Low could have succeeded with their project of tunnelling under sea over such a distance, given the technology and the ...”

“... as one resistance movement achieves some success, others take heart. Because of Algeria’s large white population the French hoped to retain their colony there after Tunisia and Morocco had won their independence: the ferocious Algerian war of independence was the result. The British fondly imagined that they would still be running Africa decades after India ...”

“... themselves in the wrong lives: Adam Murray in his friend Johnny’s, John Chadwick in his rival William Nelson’s, Richard Verey in absolutely anyone’s but his own, Richard Fisher in that of the American spy Polina Mertz. The governing myth, I think, is Grimm’s. It is the story of the ferryman who presses the oars into the hands of a passenger, who is ...”

“... dislike (not envy) of Graham Greene, on these grounds, emerges in a couplet from Byrne: And white men go to pieces, as we’ve seen, In overlauded trash by Graham Greene. Greene achieved a bogus newness, in Burgess’s view, by laboriously making grace and sin the novelties of a kind of fiction which was no more than the old sentimental sensationalism ...”

“... converting a house for their retirement. The Greens are so entirely married they even look alike: white-haired, spry, with candid blue eyes. They will prove Monti’s pattern only partial, for in their case it’s the dream house that’s going to crumble, not the dream itself, which is the fabric of their relationship. They’re wrestling ineptly with ...”

“... until the Forties. They were aided by films (and in the Forties and Fifties a TV series) starring William Boyd – a star who in the geriatric last stages of his career had barely a hop left in him. At the crucial stage of Zane Grey’s career, 1905-8, Lina took charge as her husband’s literary agent, editor and financial patron. Using his wife’s ...”

“... sexy nurses and then put out to dry in the sun, pinned up in shawls. Mr Scobie reads the Bible and William Blake, and then he makes up little riddles. One of them is about dying – but nobody wants to hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine ...”

“... the New York Public Library, persuaded Bishop to take up poetry rather than medicine after Vassar; William Carlos Williams reported after a reading: ‘Marianne Moore had a little girl named Elizabeth Bishop in tow. It seems she writes poetry.’ Moore is hymned here in one of Bishop’s less successful poems. ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’ celebrates ...”

“... Mort’ – Doxy, oh! thy glaziers shine   As glimmars by the Salomon! – and that, by William Walsh’s namby-pamby pseudo-pastoral, ‘The Despairing Lover’: Distracted with care For Phillis the fair, Since nothing could move her, Poor Damon the lover ... The three together liven each other up splendidly, and give a real sense of the ...”

“... of a pastiche of the Arts versus Science debate of the Sixties. Fogel is the champion of the ‘white woolly warmth of the quantitative revolution’, in which traditional ‘literary’ history will be displaced by a new ‘scientific’ history based on statistics and computing. Elton dissents, arguing against high-level generalisation and reasserting the ...”

“... much more touchingly, Dorothy Wordsworth makes it clear whose eyes her own journal is for, after William and his brother John had left her in Trasmere, and set off to walk into Yorkshire, ‘cold pork in their pockets’: ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return, and I set about keeping my resolve, because I will not quarrel with ...”

“... picture of a Spain bristling with violence on the verge of becoming a world power. The historian William Atkinson could be called prescient for writing, early this century, that the accession of a woman is ‘an event commonly fraught with untoward consequences’. He was, however, talking about the ‘salvation’ of Castile in the 1470s, not Britain in ...”

“... legitimacy of slave property but obligated the federal government to protect it. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison agreed with Calhoun. On 4 July 1854, in one of the most flamboyant acts of defiance in American history, he burned the Constitution, calling it ‘a covenant with death, an agreement with hell’. Three years later, in the case of Dred ...”