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“... irrecoverable, knowing what he was like can sometimes seem irrelevant, if not indeed irreverent. William Wordsworth is reputed to have slit the uncut pages of new and expensive books with a breakfast knife sticky with jam, Immanuel Kant to have controlled his socks with sock suspenders operated from his top pockets: facts which would interest us decidedly ...”

“... movement shifted aesthetes’ attention away from great houses to country cottages, black and white farmhouses, and small manor houses like Kelmscott. The past celebrated by William Morris or C.R. Ashbee was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the ...”

“... but some people worried that Germany would lash out in revenge. One morning, on the Isle of Dogs, William Regan heard a small plane fly over and get shot down, causing a surprisingly large explosion. The same thing happened to another plane, and another. ‘I said to Alf that the gunners were on form, three over, three down. Hardly credible. We began to ...”

“... infiltrations’ that the Oxford Textbook highlights were unknown to him. Eosinophils – white cells containing granules that are stained strongly by the red dye eosin – were not described until 1880. But the biggest difference between Bristowe’s allergies and those in the Oxford Textbook is not the modern understanding of the cells and chemicals ...”

“... Also like his namesake, Dave is a verbal genius. Reading Self is often reminiscent not of William Burroughs, as Self himself might wish, or of J.G. Ballard, whom Self obviously admires and seeks to emulate (clear echoes in The Book of Dave of The Drowned World), but rather of Norman Mailer, particularly the vainglorious, dick-swinging Mailer of ‘The ...”

“... haunted the pages of Time, while in Battle for the Mind (1957), the British psychologist William Sargent noted the Third Reich’s penchant for mass brainwashing: ‘Hitler never concealed his method, which included deliberately producing such phenomena by organised excitement and mass hypnotism, and even boasted how easy it was to impose “the lie ...”

“... Miltonic; in later years, Robert Morehead transformed Dante into a second Spenser, while Thomas William Parsons made him out to be ‘stately and solemn’ in the manner of ‘Gray and Dryden’. T.S. Eliot’s essay of 1929 argues against such Anglocentric and Italocentric definitions, but only by ascribing even greater consistency and homogenising power ...”

“... its competence – was ‘born unfree’. Staggering in its own way is the acute perception of Sir William Wade, who held chairs in law at both Oxford and Cambridge, that the Union was originally understood to be the ‘fundamental law’ of the new British state, but ‘the Treaty was made too early, and the argument has been raised too late, for this ...”

“... the fruit to the British West Indies resulted in a celebrated disaster. Two years earlier, William Bligh had been given command of the small armed vessel Bounty and ordered to cram it with as many Tahitian breadfruit saplings as it could carry before sailing to the Caribbean, where they were to be grown to feed slaves. En route to Tahiti, Bligh gave ...”

“... initiation ceremony in New Mexico, I noticed the woman next to me run her fingers down the smooth white laminated wall, clearly to sample its texture and identify what it was made of. She made me realise that nothing in the show can be touched, a kind of erotic prohibition that matches McQueen’s dominant note. But there was something so knowledgeable in the ...”

“... for bombing victims. He also effected the demolition of many homes to make way for the bloated white elephant of Germania, Hitler’s new capital. These clearances were paltry put beside the consequences of his work on concentration camps. He had no part in running them but it was part of his brief to get them built, to quarry and fire the materials. He ...”

“... and its inclusive culture. In recounting his memory of how welcoming his people were to early white missionaries, he writes about ‘how wholeheartedly they embraced strangers from thousands of miles away, with their different customs and beliefs’. Although he grew up in a Christian household, with regular Bible readings, he was also drawn to Igbo ...”

“... death experiences are unlikely to see a tall, bearded figure drifting towards them in a radiant white gown. Calvinists were almost impervious to demonic penetration: a paltry 11 cases were recorded in early modern Scotland, and only 25 in English Puritan or Dissenting circles. If, as Levack believes, the Salem witches were not a case of demonic ...”

“... to honour the poor and the departed, but we don’t have to be so humble and defeated about it. William Empson pointed out long ago the creepy quietism of the poem’s sentiment: it is ‘stated as pathetic’, he said, ‘but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it.’ Harrison repeatedly borrows the stanza form and rhyme ...”

“... good doctor, shining his penlight into her eyes to check her pupils, made note of beauty – ice white and blue mixed in the dead non-movement of her eyes; he thought of his 15-year-old daughter who still gave him hugs and seemed protected by his love, but he wasn’t a stupid man, and he knew the world, this world, this great country of his, could eat ...”