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“... period. In his fascinating new book, Professor Duby stresses that his subject, the knight-errant William Marshal, was never alone: ‘Who is ever alone at the beginning of the 13th century but the mad, the possessed – marginal figures who are hunted down? An orderly world requires that each man remain swathed in a fabric of solidarities, of friendships, in ...”

“... Kathy Acker, wild and woolly avatar of William Burroughs, is also one of the Blasted Allegorists, contemporary American artists whose self-important and talent-free doodles about Life, the Universe and Everything are hyped by Brian Wallis in his Introduction, a piece of writing conceivably worse than the pieces it introduces: For the writers in this book, these critical forms, such as interviews, monologues, jokes, dream narratives and parables, oppose the imposed narrative structure, the unquestioned hierarchy of characters, and the easy closure of much conventional – or even modernist – literature ...”

“... Intelligence Agency, Bill Casey, devised a plan for revenge. One of the CIA’s top agents, William Buckley, was posted to Beirut to implement it. In March 1984, Buckley was taken prisoner and tortured. Casey’s brilliant plan ended in the deaths or hasty flights of several of the CIA’s agents in the area. Casey ordered that a photograph of the ...”

“... it was laid down that a child under seven could not be convicted of felony. Much later, in 1748, William York, aged ten, murdered a child of five and buried her in a dunghill. ‘When he was examined, he showed very little concern, and appeared easy and cheerful . . . The boy was found guilty and sentenced to death; but he was respited from time to time on ...”

“... Skoda. Our EU passports were buried somewhere in the boot but we didn’t need them, our white faces documentation enough to allow us to pass freely without let or hindrance. Bayeux was busy with American tourists. The D-Day landings seem to be as much of a draw these days as the Norman Conquest. A poster showed a New Yorker cover from July ...”

“... A mob of divided, disgruntled Democrats packed the Chicago Coliseum in July 1896 as William Jennings Bryan rose to the platform and delivered a roaring speech – still the speech for part of the American left – about an economic chimera. Bryan demanded that the United States peg its currency not to gold but to silver – the equivalent of treating cancer with grape seeds ...”

“... he finds his society’. In her new novel, Will, the son named by his book-loving father after William Shakespeare, describes the secret lives led by his parents. He cannot publish what he has written, partly because every other member of his Coloured family is deeply involved in revolutionary politics, and partly because – where prying and direct ...”

“... Francophone accents everywhere and an extraordinary dynamism. Johannesburg culture – black or white – is all about flashy consumption. The big car generally comes first and people are often judged by what they drive. Indeed, it takes a degree of mental flexibility to measure the depth of the shallowness. Nonetheless the town has zip and brio and many ...”

“... and ruled capital punishment itself to be ‘cruel and unusual’. In Furman’s case only William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s one black member, voted to strike down nearly all existing capital statutes on the grounds that they were intrinsically in violation of human rights or communal dignity. As Marshall put it in another ...”

“... art, advertising, commerce and philanthropy are intertwined.Branding Sunlight Soap was the idea of William Hesketh Lever. He entered his father’s wholesale grocery business at the age of 16. The firm Lever Brothers was founded in 1885 when he was in his early thirties and, with his brother, bought a small soap works in Warrington. In 1887 they moved to a ...”

“... steps to articulate the greenery (which, because his photographs, like Smith’s, are in black and white, is not green at all). While water and sculpture are picked up by painters and photographers, they are not needed urgently in a real garden. The experience of walking along a big herbaceous border, taking in the complicated plant relationships one by ...”

“... in 1988. Though she died in 2007, she and her husband are listed as co-authors of Slavery in White and Black. Based on a great deal of new research, the book will nevertheless seem familiar to anyone who has managed to keep up with even a fraction of the couple’s prodigious output. They have ‘long insisted’, Genovese explains at the outset, that in ...”

“... consecutive years in the late 1820s: Maria, Gabriel Charles (later to call himself Dante Gabriel), William and Christina. Their father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a political exile, driven out of Italy as a result of his activities as a nationalist. A poet, an ardent Dante scholar and the centre of a group of expatriates, he became a professor of Italian at the ...”

“... belonged to his parents too. In the absence of any other aristocracy in residence in Dublin, Sir William and Lady Wilde represented a type of grandeur that they had built with their books and their brains, their independence of mind and their high-toned eccentricity. When Wilde describes himself in De Profundis as ‘a lord of language’, he is suggesting ...”

“... a rich widow and built Oxnead Hall, ten miles north of Norwich. Clement’s great-great-nephew, William, inherited it in 1632. ‘The Paston Treasure’ (c.1663) Six years later William set out on a Grand Tour that would take in the German states, Italy, Athens, Constantinople and Cairo. He built up a magnificent ...”