“... if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s generally ...”

“... winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables ...”

“... merchants and clerics of Genoa or Antwerp. In his catalogue essay, Malcolm Rogers quotes William Sanderson, his near-contemporary, as saying that Van Dyck was the first painter that ‘e’er put ladies’ dress into a careless romance’, and goes on to quote Herrick’s ‘Whenas in silks my Julia Goes’. As well as ease and sweet disorder there ...”

“... Depending​ where you look, the William Burroughs centenary has either occasioned an outpouring of variously celebratory and carping prose, or a trickle of grudging acknowledgment in outlets thought to speak for the literary establishment. Writing on anything of passing public interest triggers an online avalanche of ad hominem posturing which quickly renders the original topic, whatever it was, numbingly opaque ...”

“... the Gulag were being asked by left oppositionists, from Boris Souvarine to Victor Serge to C.L.R. James, in real time and at great peril. Those courageous and prescient heretics have been somewhat written out of history (they expected far worse than that, and often received it).’ This internal dissent was a natural part of the Communist movement, in clear ...”

“... who don’t need to live something in order to write it, who use their ‘imaginations’. William Vollmann, with whom Zambreno professes a sympathy, intentionally puts himself in extreme situations, then writes about them. David Foster Wallace (to whom Zambreno doesn’t relate) in his fiction seemingly did not. So when Keeler, offended by ...”

“... with more critical praise than any other piece of fiction published in the US in 2009 (see James Wood’s review in the New Yorker, for one example among many). Many of Davis’s readers have tended to argue that her power is in the microscope she applies to her own life. In ‘Mrs D and Her Maids’, for example, Mrs D writes to a prospective maid ...”

“... and of complaints kept at bay. Like the previous modern biographies by R. George Thomas (1985) and William Cooke (1970), but slightly more so, Wilson’s book is really the story, despite her equivocations, of Thomas’s despair; and then of the remarkable and brief late flowering and flaring of his poetry, with his untimely and now famous early death at Arras ...”

“... then governing the slave refuge colony of Sierra Leone, Zachary, like his fellow abolitionist William Wilberforce, believed the spread of the Gospel was a much greater cause. Blacks should be free to serve their – that is, his – God, and to take their proper places in the hierarchy of humanity that the evangelicals saw as ‘natural’, and essential ...”

“... in the Kremlin wall, as well as foreign Comintern luminaries such as the US union activist William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood. Physical incorporation in the walls of the citadel was the ultimate honour for the illustrious dead. As Brown says, the walls haven’t gone away. Circumvallation thrives, and not just as heritage townscape: today’s barriers are ...”

“... the Royal Navy was riddled with popery and that the Duke of York (Lord High Admiral and the future James II) had wasted public funds. A select committee was appointed to investigate. When his enemies won the general election in March, the duke fled. In his absence, Samuel Pepys, as secretary of the navy, was left to face the music. Pepys was found guilty of ...”

“... It is ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ...”

“... enthusiasm for Patton: Lust for Glory that would seem to have had world-historical consequences. William Rogers, then secretary of state, called the president a ‘walking ad’ for the movie. The White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, advised his young aides to see the film to get a handle on Nixon’s mindset. Kissinger saw it as a sign that he had ...”

“... of Tyerman’s unsentimental look at the careers of 28 Harrow Heads, from the first incumbent, William Launce, who took up office at what was then called the Harrow Free Grammar School in 1615, with the vicar’s son as his first pupil, to Ian Beer, the last Head but one, who retired in 1991. A few emerge as hopelessly inadequate to the task of running a ...”

“... dramatically reduced Indian populations and changed the physical environment. It created what James Merrell called ‘the Indian’s New World’, a world as changed and daunting for Indian peoples as it was for Europeans. For Richter, as for Merrell, Indians are as much a people of history as Europeans and Africans are; they find themselves in the middle ...”