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“... doesn’t actually eat all that much, but for some reason she just can’t help but gain weight. William Leith, on the other hand, admits that he can’t stop eating. At the start of The Hungry Years he tries to describe his addiction. He says of a BLT sandwich: it ‘practically fell down my throat; it was like dropping a billiard ball down a ...”

“... them in its Soft Dressing department – not at all to be confused with the sartorial despair William Leith has recently called ‘going floaty’.) Ruth wore them first, apparently, when she was expecting her twins, then later when she knew she was dying and was ‘spending money like there was no tomorrow’. She liked them, her sister ...”

“... is a young man called Mark Renton or Rents, a heroin addict who was born and brought up in Leith, the old port neighbourhood on the north-eastern side of Edinburgh. Renton has had it with steady work, having been an apprentice joiner for a while and given it up. He has tried, and also given up on, being a university student in Aberdeen, where he blew ...”

“... planetary orbits by thinking God’s thoughts after him, but obstructive in the 19th century, when William Whewell, Louis Agassiz and Richard Owen resisted the transmutation of species. Desmond’s informed analysis points to a more subtle conclusion. An idealist metaphysic may not have contributed to the science of evolutionary mechanics, but it did make a ...”

“... 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco ...”

“... front rank of politics. To be sure, he was a robust and formidable party warhorse – a kind of William Harcourt or Roy Hattersley, say – with enormous energy, considerable administrative drive and a powerful debating style. But he captured no imaginations, lifted no horizons and inspired no disciples. He left worthy memorials – the National Parks, for ...”

“... to the lucky and ambitious. Overall they give a vivid sense of the variety of the seafaring life. William Spavens’s Narrative was published by a Louth printer in 1796, and has been reprinted in recent years. Growing up in Cleethorpes on the Lincolnshire coast, he believed that ‘sailors must be happy men to have such opportunities of visiting foreign ...”

“... paper chase at the British Library, where his archive arrived as late as 1995. In the early 1800s, William Bray, a solicitor and antiquarian, and William Upcott, a librarian whose address was Autograph Cottage and who was a notorious ‘collector’ of other people’s unconsidered trifles, arrived at Wotton and were invited ...”

“... to translate Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. He abandoned a (now lost) dramatic tragedy about William Wallace after two acts, and his best-known poem, ‘Auld Reekie’, was envisaged as a work in more cantos than the magnificent one and a bit that survive. Fergusson’s oeuvre, as we have it today, consists essentially of brilliant, occasional, often ...”

“... all, let alone an even closer one, and that Scotland should choose its own Protestant monarch when William III died. That this desire did not prevail, and that the Scottish Parliament voted for its own abolition only a few years later while hostile crowds rampaged through the streets of Edinburgh, had a great deal to do with Darien but little to do with any ...”

“... by political disagreements, Taylor, a known and convinced Tory and devotee of the prime minister, William Pitt, managed to remain on friendly terms with men such as William Godwin and the great satirical poet John Wolcot, ‘Peter Pindar’, whom Pitt’s government regarded as dangerously disloyal.Friendship was his true ...”

“... their distress. Gottfried Kinkel’s and Carl Schurz’s first taste of freedom was in the port of Leith on a Sunday. It took them seven hours to find somewhere to eat. What the exiles faced was that tyranny of the majority that Mill excoriated in On Liberty, where he observed that, while the yoke of law was lighter in England than in most other countries of ...”

“... merely makes the line difficult to say. It presents, in fact, the same trap as does ‘The Leith police dismissed us’ which was once allegedly used to discover whether people were drunk or not. Though currently neglected, in his lifetime Bridges had far more than his fifteen minutes. For decades he was in everybody’s top three and frequently ...”

“... that unites Hazzard’s ‘heroes’: Ted Tice and Adam Vail in The Transit of Venus, and Aldred Leith in The Great Fire, who like Tice is posted to Kure in 1947. Those who can’t or won’t imagine other people’s suffering (including a host of obtuse and self-serving characters who work for Nato, the UN, the Foreign Office and Parliament) are not simply ...”

“... luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James William Doyle, an uncle of Arthur Conan Doyle – was known as a meticulous historian, and the figures are vividly and accurately presented, using known 18th-century likenesses. Dr Johnson is holding forth, with the professional eavesdropper Boswell at his ...”