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“... is excluded is that we are left with a thinner record of reader-response. Some of the research for William Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England was conducted in Cambridge University Library, where every desk bears a sign reading ‘Marking of Books is Forbidden’, many of them imaginatively defaced. When I worked there at around ...”

“... York, where, increasingly desperate to crack the cipher, he enlisted the cryptographic skills of William Newbold, a professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania, who spent years studying the manuscript under a microscope and came to believe that the glyphs concealed a second cipher – microletters encoded into each penstroke. Voynich was elated. ‘When the time ...”

“... recent novel deals with one of the most fraught subjects in US history: the long march of General William Tecumseh Sherman in the final months of the Civil War. The election of 1864 was a referendum on whether the Union should fight to achieve total victory or seek a negotiated peace, which would almost certainly have ...”

“... 40-acre parcels to freed slaves was introduced in Congress. Though implemented in part by General William Sherman in respect of the former slaves who had fought under him, this early gesture towards restitution was ended by President Andrew Johnson in 1869 and has been the subject of bitter jokes ever since. Looters in urban riots a century later claimed ...”

“... out how the popes piped fresh water to their city and sewage away from it.* Lawrence Principe and William Newman (Alchemy Tried in the Fire, 2002) and Pamela Smith (The Making and Knowing Project) have decrypted arcane manuscripts and recreated forgotten crafts to establish how alchemists and artisans actually did their work, which they then ...”

“... Colleagues shunned him; the FBI investigated him; congressional subcommittees harassed him; and William F. Buckley taunted him with nicknames like ‘Sherbert Matthews’. He also received death threats from Cuban exiles in Miami, and once had to flee a platform at the University of New Mexico because the local police believed there might be a bomb in the ...”

“... the aftermath of slavery, freedpeople throughout the South demanded access to land. When General William T. Sherman met with a group of black ministers in Savannah in January 1865, he asked what would enable the emancipated slaves to live as free people. They answered: ‘Give us land.’ ...”

“... long, grinding conflict he feared had come to pass. In 1864 the campaigns of Grant in Virginia and William T. Sherman in Georgia put unrelenting pressure on an exhausted South. Lincoln’s re-election that autumn effectively sealed the war’s outcome. A few months later, at Appomattox, Lee donned a ‘splendid’ new ...”

“... to the project, and his personal access to Lincoln frustrated key figures in the cabinet. William Seward, the secretary of state, opposed colonisation and held it up; John Usher, the interior secretary, claimed authority over the emigration bureau and felt undermined by Mitchell; Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, coveted black manpower for the ...”

“... depicting Hollywood’s own wild party. The paradigm of all movies about Hollywood is probably William Wellman’s 1937 melodrama A Star is Born, which has been remade twice as a musical and was itself based on George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? of 1932. The basic story contrasts the inexorable rise to stardom of an unassuming waitress with the fall ...”

“... In the novels of William Gibson and other writers of cyberpunk, the new SF sub-genre, in the glittery non-realism of the movies, cyberspace is crystalline and neonlit and shiny, a place of infinite depth and detail, of towers and canyons and technicolor hypergeometry, the ‘consensual hallucination shared daily by billions ...”

“... that when he became a hat designer, at scarcely twenty years old, he did so semi-anonymously as ‘William J.’ and ‘William Jay’. We see his overwhelming desire to be close to women’s clothes transmuted into the need to know everything about them. He doesn’t reflect on how a flamboyant maker became a self-effacing ...”

“... didn’t take long for him to become spectacularly successful. In 1953, he starred on Broadway in William Inge’s Picnic, in which he was ‘stiff and wooden but an actor’, according to the film director Sidney Lumet. John Foreman told Stern that every studio wanted him after that, and he officially became the ‘hot guy’. Over the next few years he just ...”

“... laugh at the farcical communities of Stars and Bars, in the defeated land of Robert E. Lee, where Sherman marched so ruthlessly. William Boyd’s title will suggest Hollywood to some – but a Virginian, seeing me carrying it about, sighed ‘Ah, the old flag’ and became unusually pensive. He began telling me about the ...”

“... compared to Loomis’s development of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. On land that General Sherman had given to freed slaves during the Civil War, he constructed an opulent sporting preserve, where he ‘played the country squire’ and treated Yankee visitors to dinners of Rabelaisian vastness: ‘The big kitchen sent out a tempting fragrance of roast ...”