“... celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper. He fashioned oars from dried fishes tied to sticks, and strapped inflated animal bladders to the sides of the boat to help it float. Taylor was not a shy man. His list ...”

“... modern historiography. It is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between ...”

“... the plays (like those of Athens) constituted a civic festival designed to draw in audiences from miles around. It must be probable that the young Shakespeare saw them at least once, maybe several times; and there is every reason to imagine that they made a deeper impression on him than on the old man in Westmorland. They would have provided not just a ...”

“... his way is through Chaos and the Bottomless and Pathless; not handy for making out many miles upon.’Richard Holmes suspects that Tennyson was having a protracted nervous breakdown, whose immediate causes were not hard to discern. He had suspended his unofficial engagement to Emily Sellwood in the summer of 1840 ...”

“... and surveys a number of translators who were information-gatherers for their paymasters (Richard Burton, for example, the maker of a steamy Arabian Nights). Briggs lobbied hard for the job of translating Roland Barthes’s famous lecture series at the Collège de France, and, in spite of being a newcomer to ‘this little art’, was ...”

“... turn one of them off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly ...”

“... to the family farm, where there were no books and few children to play with. His younger brother, Richard, was a chip off the old block – ‘exuberant, outdoorsy, athletic’, everything John was not – and his father’s favourite. Richard died of leukaemia shortly before John turned 13 in 1940. A shadow descended on ...”

“... had known as The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster, Richard Duke of York and All Is True, for example, reappeared as, respectively, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3 and Henry VIII.) Pre-Christian British kings, however, though just as solemnly vouched for by Holinshed’s Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as ...”

“... every letter, packet and small parcel posted from or sent to every address in six hundred square miles of England, from the M25 down to the south coast, from Eastbourne in the east to Littlehampton at the westernmost edge of the county. They sort two and a half million items a day. Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe ...”

“... thirty years, over which time it had attracted some notable members, including Jackson Pollock, Richard Price and Judy Collins. But its more disturbing practices had passed unnoticed by the wider world until the Voice ran its exposé. Even then, as members defected and word spread of the grotesque cruelties perpetrated in the name of its supposedly utopian ...”

“... man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations.’ Richard Buckminster Fuller, who liked to be called Bucky, was born in 1895 to a family of stubborn, bossy New England individualists. Even the Fuller family cow was ‘tyrannical’, Nathaniel Hawthorne once complained. (Hawthorne was a friend of Bucky’s ...”

“... is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge of a cliff, suspending the sound in dead silence until the next verse begins. It’s a stark, shuddering effect, the pleasure cut like a heater in a cheap hotel ...”

“... might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats and Shelley (I don’t think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes’s Shelley: The Pursuit all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of long and short, one can’t do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw – and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows ...”

“... artists don’t have the opposite tendency. Some, like the contemporary San Francisco artist Jimmy Miles, incline to a dry, coolly minimalist practice, in which white space is not only tolerated, but an essential, if seriously off-kilter aesthetic feature in its own right: I’m not sure what to call Miles’s austere and ...”

“... Blam (1971) with these anxious imaginings. The town is Novi Sad, on the banks of the Danube, fifty miles north-west of Belgrade. It’s the 1950s, but Blam, in his thirties, feels he is ‘the fossil of a long forgotten age’, walking a ‘city full of ghosts’. As he looks down onto Main Square from his rooftop, or takes a tram along the boulevard, the ...”