“... huddled together … everywhere crimson mingling with the brown, and here and there a waxen-white face with draggled hair staring up into the smiling heavens … Such was our introduction to the glories of war.’ Several men were burned alive. ‘The carnage it caused is awful,’ a Turkish lieutenant wrote after one engagement. ‘Dismembered parts of ...”

“... his European self. Jo Stoyte, whose collection of books Pordage has come to archive, is a William Randolph Hearst-style Hollywood tycoon who owns ‘BEVERLEY PANTHEON, The Personality Cemetery’, a vast graveyard landscaped as a country estate which contains replicas of famous buildings from all over the world: of the Tower of Pisa (‘only this one ...”

“... home where ‘the panel of one of the windows opened up halfway, pushed outward by a bare, white arm that stretched out from a loose, flowing sleeve. We could see by the gleam of the torch … the ravishing shape of a young girl appearing on tiptoe between the open shutters.’ Graziella is Beppino’s sister. She is innocent, sensual and 17. ‘Her ...”

“... gored a child (the dog escaped the chop thanks to the Princess’s top-dollar brief). Even Prince William, once the press’s golden boy, was reported to have dispatched flunkeys to buy him porno mags from the local newsagent. Then came bruits of rape within the precincts of Buckingham Palace, and reports that the Royals’ London flophouses doubled as ...”

“... it was looking as if both of these sources would soon be exhausted. In 1898, the English chemist William Crookes sounded a Malthusian alarm: the world’s population, he said, would very soon outstrip its food supply. This was a global crisis in the making, but, Crookes warned, it was especially acute for ...”

“... cordillera vibrates in the distance at the edge of the plain, a bucolic scene complete with the white spirits of whirling plastic bags and the spasmodic craziness of driven cattle. Black wisps of ash float down as the sugar plantations, the dominant force in the valley, owned by a tiny handful of whites, insist now on burning some of the crop before harvest ...”

“... Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an English Turandot’. But he had better sustain that interest, since this is only the first of two projected volumes on the subject, ‘the book of the Channel Four series’ (which must be preferred to a book of the movie Elizabeth, if there ...”

“... now he’ll take his mother’s blood’), or his description of fields as ‘dewy cemeteries … white with mushroom tombs’. Still, it’s true that for all his talk of waiting for poems to come naturally, his persona can seem forced and theatrical. Shaw suspected that he’d read no poets later than Cowper and Crabbe, and certainly his ...”

“... Frankenstein … obsessed with one xenophobic idea’. ‘There was disquiet across the white world,’ de Bellaigue writes, at Mossadegh’s ‘show of Oriental bad form’. The Foreign Office started a campaign to persuade the American public of the rightness of the British cause and the US press duly fell in with it. The New York Times and the ...”

“... move its audience entirely. Julius Caesar, coldly clear-cut and sonorous, reddens its black and white Roman world with the fountain of blood at its secret centre. And then there is Hamlet. Hamlet is too large to include in a list: it crowned and summarised everything Shakespeare wrote in the 1590s, and lit up its audiences with excitement, awe and amusement ...”

“... to appear of the mammoth Life of Mahomet from Original Sources by the Scottish Orientalist Sir William Muir, a colonial administrator in India’s Northwest Provinces. Muir drew on the eighth-century hagiographer Ibn Ishaq, the Persian scholar al-Tabari, and the ninth-century biographers Ibn al-Waqidi and Ibn Sa‘d, pre-eminent authors of the sira, the ...”

“... spoken by the (real-life) biographer George Ticknor about his (real-life) subject, the historian William Prescott. But recent projects have been more collaborative: in 2009, Heti appeared as ‘Leonore’ in Leanne Shapton’s love story disguised as an auction catalogue, Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Leonore Doolan and ...”

“... Out of context, his epigraphs can seem like sly jokes and maybe some are. The quotation from William of Ockham that begins Biting the Air – ‘Every property is the property of something, but it is not the property of just anything’ – relates to language and logic; but the poem is partly about intellectual property, and it isn’t uninteresting ...”

“... Winston Churchill. One may disapprove of spin, but there are limits. Balfour’s teacher at Eton, William Johnson, described him as ‘fearless, resolved and negligently great’. The sting is in the ‘negligently’; Johnson, author of the ‘Eton Boating Song’, was also the author of the famous and equally sharp judgment on Balfour’s great Liberal ...”

“... as ‘a man in a crowd of eunuchs’. The liberal critic Théophile Thoré (then publishing as William Bürger) contributed to the buzz by reporting that the entire canvas had taken only four days. That wasn’t true; but, like another of his claims for the picture, it stuck. ‘Henceforth,’ he declared, ‘Camille is immortal and will be called The ...”