“... and inventors. Nonetheless, it was a Scottish (or at least Anglo-Scottish) educationalist, Sir William Spens, who in his 1938 report on the future of secondary education proposed that children should be given a place at grammar school if ‘family circumstance and tradition’ meant they were likely to work ‘with tongue and pen’ – in other words, not ...”

“... battles won ‘in bygone days of yore’. Behind Paisley’s head as he spoke was a painting of William of Orange on his white horse at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. One of the key achievements of the Good Friday Agreement was increased alignment between the North and the Republic. In order to avoid the return of a ...”

“... joke about an Englishman who finds himself in Protestant Belfast on 12 July, the anniversary of William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne. Puzzled by what he sees, the man accosts a local:‘I say, what’s going on here?’‘It’s the Twalth!’‘I beg your pardon … The twelfth?’‘Ay, the Twalth.’‘I’m sorry: the twelfth ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The suicides of Harriet Shelley and Fanny Imlay, the deaths of Mary’s children Clare in 1818 and William in 1819, coming so close together must have had for her the weight of a curse. This story of 1820 seems to say that in a family where only forbidden affections can thrive it is better that all life cease. Read alongside Frankenstein, it also confirms Jay ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... figure of Chatterjee’s book. In June 1756, Siraj laid siege to the British garrison at Fort William in Calcutta. The governor and many of the soldiers fled by boat. When those who remained surrendered, they were put in a small (or large) room, where, by the next morning, some (or many) had died of exhaustion, dehydration, asphyxiation or through ...”

“... Paz’s recurring references are to Baudelaire and Nerval, but his work is often close to that of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Weinberger tells us that when he (correctly) identified a touch of Whitman in the title and rhythms of the poem ‘I Speak of the City’, Paz said: ‘No, I was thinking of Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of ...”

“... who ‘much later … compelled me to try and draw better’). Thankfully, Burne-Jones also had William Morris, his friend from university. They had chosen the cause of art together, and Morris was to barrel their joint enterprise along for the next forty years or so. Burne-Jones’s earliest works, done in the late 1850s, were in pen-and-ink, one of ...”