“... narrow: ‘the way in which the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge shaped the physics of men such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell’. Of course, nobody believes that even Cambridge in the early years of the last century was so inward-looking that the Tripos and Smith’s Prize examinations were ...”

“... some of them.’ The subsequent film made Villa a movie star – which Walsh was later to do for James Cagney. Instead, Fuentes takes Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) as his quixotic American hero. Bierce was born obscurely, of farming stock in Ohio. Virtually nothing is known of his origins. He served in the Civil War in the Indiana infantry with reckless ...”

“... Hugh Ouston produces work on the institutional changes brought about during and immediately after James VII’s forced cool-off in Scotland in the early 1680s; others of the essays show a willingness to investigate aspects of Scottish society, both civil and ecclesiastical, before the Enlightenment. These voices have mostly not been heard before, and the book ...”

“... new Lurie doesn’t resemble a Bradbury or Lodge, or for that matter an early Lurie, so much as William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, which also investigates how members of one Anglophone culture don’t merely observe but exploit the other one. The protagonists in the new Lurie and Boyd novels are diffident people in mid-life, misfits or at least ...”

“... under Moses.’ It was as a preacher of ‘free grace’ that Clarkson first made his mark. James Nayler, who is sometimes taken as the leader of a ‘Ranting’ tendency in early Quakerism, was equally known as a defender of ‘the universal free grace of God to all mankind’. Davis passes by, with one glancing reference, Christopher Hill’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 more aristocratic foreign visitors to London’, making it sound like something out of a Henry James novel. Newnham-Davis wrote that Mrs Myra Washington dined there, an American who knew ‘most people who are worth knowing in Europe’. As she sat at her table, her ‘cream-coloured miracle of a dress’ was reflected in all the mirrors. What​ explains ...”

“... besatined brats. (Five years later Van Dyck was dead, aged only 42, and the next court appointee, William Dobson, painted the Prince of Wales with early Civil War alarums behind him: by that time, young Charles Stuart appears irredeemably devious.) Intuition beats cold reasoning: that was what Van Dyck inferred from his study of Titian. But his own intuitions ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have been better selected; if the younger Sickert deserves any credence, a certain Francis E. James is one of the great painters of the 1890s, but maybe his works, like many others mentioned here, have sunk too deep in the historical oubliette to be retrieved. And then, one might complain that the sheer scholarly discretion of the editing under-represents ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... accurately as possible. Crippen certainly didn’t want any more children. Charlotte’s brother, William, would later say that she’d written to her family before her death, from their new home in Salt Lake City, to tell them that Crippen was forcing her to have abortions. She had already submitted to ‘two dangerous cuttings’ when she wrote: ‘My ...”

“... into world dominators. Vital steps to its development included the technical breakthrough of William Levett, the rector of Buxted, and the Sussex ironmaster Ralph Hogge, who in the early 1540s worked out how to make guns out of cast-iron (not welded iron or cast-bronze) which did not blow up and were a quarter of the price of gunmetal guns. Because of ...”