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“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in ...”

“... come from the extraordinary George Drysdale. He was born in 1824, the second youngest son of Sir William Drysdale, a leading Edinburgh citizen and one-time City Treasurer. ‘Our idolised boy’, as his sister called him, had a dazzling career at Edinburgh Academy, and in 1841 embarked with no less lustre on a Classics degree at Glasgow. Then the darkness ...”

“... memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or heard on headphones is ...”

“... of American capitalism. New Labour’s task was to join the march of history, advancing this brand of capitalism and re-engineering social institutions when they failed to obey its imperatives. Blair’s love affair with America cut short his leadership. His support of the Bush administration in its invasion of Iraq was based in part on a belief in the ...”

“... knowledge about Muhammad because they knew how similar his Alcoran was to their own adulterated brand of Christianity. He pushed for a printed edition of the Quran in Latin, and wrote the preface when it appeared. But for Catholics like Thomas More, it was Luther who was Muhammad, in his iconoclasm and his lust, a priest who took a wife and bid Protestant ...”

“... during the Spanish Civil War, someone put a bullet through it). Like it or not, ‘Orwell’ is a brand: ordinariness, common decency, speaking plain truths to power, a haggard, prophetic gaze. It is surely some or all of those qualities, rather than any particular political prescience, which have been invoked by the remarkable spike in the sales of Nineteen ...”

“... the editors can without much difficulty find scholarly reasons for printing the brand new Jacobean word ‘iaunct’ in their text. In the nature of the case this kind of thing must often recur in such an edition. Theobald’s celebrated ‘babbled of green fields’ in Henry V, which licenses the editors to print ‘babeld’, is not even ...”

“... Master’s letters rather exasperating. ‘I read your current novel with pleasure,’ he wrote to William Dean Howells in 1880, ‘but I don’t think the subject fruitful, & I suspect that much of the public will agree with me.’ As a response to another novelist’s work, this is uncharacteristic only in its brevity – and in James’s youthful assurance ...”

“... such as Pennsylvania, were simply proprietary enterprises, with an individual, for instance William Penn, receiving huge land grants from an indebted Crown. Yet even these colonies soon encouraged joint stock companies to establish towns or generate commerce. Joint stocks allowed merchants to become ‘portfolio colonialists’, who could entrust the ...”

“... the commandant. His arms were loaded with silver knives and forks, but he was not embarrassed. William Shirer, Berlin Diary The first episode, in 1901, concerns the behaviour of British, Russian, German and other allied troops, after the defeat of the Boxer rebellion in China. The second took place during the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese Imperial Army ...”

“... is not a favourite of his. Unlike Elizabeth, James relished Lord Henry Howard’s ‘unctuous brand of flattery’. He also had a penchant for beautiful young men. Ashton makes no moral judgment about their gender, but he is very critical of the fact that, unlike Elizabeth, who also had male favourites, James allowed his to monopolise power and ...”

“... in a more complex and satisfying way than journalism ever could. A copyright note records that William Boyd’s 13 stories originally appeared in sites as diverse as the London Magazine, Mayfair (a down-market, English Playboy), Punch and on Radio 4’s Morning Story. Teasingly, the acknowledgment doesn’t tell us which story belongs where. But it is safe ...”

“... and the show opened with a huge nuclear explosion, following which, in the words of the producer William Donaldson, the audience was treated to a whole evening’s worth of ‘terrible gloomy stuff – the punchline of every sketch was people dying.’ Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members) and the ...”

“... of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a friend of William Morris and the junior Pre-Raphaelites and destined for a career bound up though never identifiable with their circle. From the beginning there is a wary sobriety about Webb, at variance with the antics and impulsiveness of Morris and Rossetti. Some of ...”

“... been understood by those who use and abuse them. In his introduction to The Naked Lunch (1959), William Burroughs tickertapes: ‘Junk is the ideal product … the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy … The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his ...”