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“... they look like? Like a brown and purple cloud-shadow spread out across the uplands, described by William Atkins in characteristically fine focus when he says of the North Yorkshire moors that ‘the new blooms were silverish specks; they were pale grey, beige and mint green. I picked a sprig, but the moor-purple visible from a distance was not a colour ...”

“... 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 well.’ He ...”

“... naval officer striated with pride, it came to seem, if reports are true, like a life sentence. William Shawcross, in his expertly genuflecting biography of the queen mother, shows us a Duke of Edinburgh just after his wedding, a young man in love writing to his mother-in-law of the new unity he has just achieved and hopes will bless the future. ‘Lilibet ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... put into his patients had to be removed and replaced. He did the work himself. His biographer, William Waugh, quotes one witness as saying the sight of Charnley going to each operation was ‘like observing a monk pouring ashes over his own head’. Punishing himself further, Charnley went around for nine months with a lump of Teflon implanted in his thigh ...”

“... was his given name) and a married man. Kathleen gave up waiting for him and found a husband, William Manson, employee of a local dry cleaner. They moved to Cincinnati. She named the baby after her dead father, Charles. She was 16. And she was still a bit wild. She kept going out most nights, and after three years ...”

“... vestry, a town hall, is remembered and recorded. The work of the architects (Caesar Augustus Long, William Hunt, A.G. Cross) responsible for its development and redevelopment is acknowledged. More recent exploitations of a building denied any proper function since the 1980s are ignored. No notices commemorate ‘Whirlygig’ club nights when New Age ravers ...”

“... one occasion in the Thirties, Virginia Woolf reported conversations with Tony Butts, friend of William Plomer and brother of Mary, about his sister. She is a bad woman – pretentious – I can see no merit in her books – pretentious. She corrupts young men. They are always committing suicide. She has now married Gabriel ...”

“... Red Regiment were much younger, just apprentices. None had fought before; only a few in Sir William Waller’s whole army had experienced battle. They trusted in providence, thought of home and tried to obey the orders barked at them. There was dense fog, and the men were only yards from their objective when the cluster of buildings, with their ...”

“... little foreign imports and works of art like the Lamborghini. It was not so unrealistic. Sir William Lyons founded the Jaguar car company on such a dream in the Thirties and the dream survived both World War Two and the increasingly sporty performance of the staid family saloon. Hard-nosed American dealers were prepared to pay $25,000 for a DeLorean ...”

“... and other international versions of English (‘frontiersman’, for example, supplied by Francis Atkins, a New Mexico doctor), and he always viewed overtly nationalistic accounts of the OED’s purpose with suspicion. Murray aimed not just for completeness but to create a series of volumes that would record language as a living entity. As Ogilvie puts ...”

“... gave orders to destroy a statue of Mangin in the seventh arrondissement.A performance piece by William Kentridge, The Head and the Load, which premiered at Tate Modern in July, is now showing at the Armory in New York (until 15 December). It tells the story of African porters serving the Great Powers as they fought it out in their respective African ...”

“... We buy a luminous blue and white Victorian tile at Gabor Cossa which one of the partners thinks is William de Morgan but isn’t and then cross the road to the Fitzwilliam. I take in a chance selection of pictures, dictated by which happen to be in range of available banquettes, and in particular the Van Dyck portrait of Archbishop Laud. It’s hung beside one ...”

“... quixotic chase after a texte de fétiche, a putative sequel to ‘The House on the Borderland’, William Hope Hodgson’s not-greatly-known classic of Fin-de-Siècle gothic. For various reasons, they have been led to expect that they may receive important information regarding it at each of the leylines’ nodal points in turn. And do they? Well, sort of. At ...”

“... uncovered. To describe the physical basis of an experience is not to negate the experience, as William James pointed out long ago. But now that neuroscience has such excellent tools for envisaging and describing the brain, we are tempted to accept descriptions of physiological processes as a complete account of experience. We then go further, and make ...”