“... as Belphoebe, Diana, a goddess supreme, never fully forgave him. Ralegh wrote a letter to Sir Robert Cecil from the Tower which was probably intended to be shown to the queen in order to win back her favour. The letter displays Ralegh at his best and worst. It’s a monstrous blast of self-pity, tempered by his ...”

“... to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to the crown. He attached himself to Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, the dashing royal favourite, who championed his cause and urged the queen to make him her attorney-general. When that office fell to his rival Edward Coke, he set his sights on the solicitor-generalship, but with an equal ...”

“... date. As I described in the LRB on 13 April 2000, the economists Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton drew on the log-normal distribution (and on a number of other assumptions about market conditions) to reduce the complicated problem of understanding the prices of options to a relatively simple differential equation. The work, published in ...”

“... and ‘lesbo-Victorian’ are all terms Waters herself has used in self-description – though generally not all of them at once – and they are both accurate enough and unfair. The books are indeed pastiches: Victoriana as a queer theorist might perform it, with costumes by Judith Butler, prisons and madhouses by ...”

“... massive, and unquestionably confiscated, correspondence, a remnant of which was acquired by Sir Robert Cotton? Where are the papers of Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More? Perhaps the former kept none; the latter, practising his famous discretion, very likely destroyed his in the months during which, still free, he could confidently look forward to his ...”

“... wife, Anne of Bohemia, he may not have desired her sexually. His favourite and probable lover, Robert de Vere, also stayed childless through two marriages. Richard may have taken perverse comfort in his failure to beget a successor because it made him seem indispensable. Two hundred years later, another childless monarch, Elizabeth I, had John Hayward ...”

“... poet to have been keen on boxing and, apparently, quite good at it: we may think of Lord Byron and Robert Graves. But few others, surely, have written and worried so concernedly about the ethics of this sport, its moral justification. Ring of Truth, his first novel since The Big Time in 1965, returns hungrily to Scannell’s old problem. Can deliberate ...”

“... quantity has found its way to the West to merit a compact but lavishly illustrated history from Robert Fisher, a grasp of the current situation needs more explicit testimony than even these powerful images provide. It is obvious from Warren Smith’s marathon retelling of the tangled tale of Tibet and its longstanding relationship with China that things may ...”

“... 11 short pieces called ‘The Payne Whitney Poems’. The Payne Whitney, I knew from reading about Robert Lowell, was a New York mental hospital, in the same way I knew from reading Lunar Caustic that the Bellevue was a New York mental hospital, and here was a clutch of texts fit to set beside Malcolm Lowry’s book, or Lowell’s ‘Waking in the Blue’ or ...”

“... contrast, the sermons of Donne were marred, Eliot thought, by their proto-modernity, an excess of self-indulgent personalism. Donne, ‘the religious spell-binder . . . the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy’, had about him the whiff of ‘impure motives’ and ‘facile success’. Interestingly, in developing this comparison, Eliot mobilised ...”

“... as part of a management plan. Once reintroduced, though, they might show signs of being a bit self-willed: white-tailed eagles have an eight-foot wingspan. Recently, one took a flight round the Asda car park in Dunfermline. People were so alarmed they called the police.If there’s a breath of wild at Asda, in the furthest flung places you might find ...”

“... dramatic events of the conflict: the battle of Teruel, when he, Hemingway and the photographer Robert Capa accompanied Republican forces during their heady initial victories; the siege of Barcelona, where ‘I and a million others saw things which Dante could not have imagined’; the Ebro fighting, when Hemingway saved Matthews’s life by preventing his ...”

“... of media, and in her lifetime was known as a writer, she is now remembered for her photographic self-portraits, mainly taken in the 1920s, which stage her in various personae (aviator, buddha, doll, angel). She never had an exhibition of photographs in her lifetime, and they hardly circulated. Thomson’s narrator is Schwob/Cahun’s life partner, Suzanne ...”

“... to be you, then you are conscious. Consciousness is also, as before, sometimes seen as a special self-aware kind of thought. So today the literature often makes divisions between different senses of the term, distinguishing ‘phenomenal’ consciousness – the feel of experience – from senses that have to do with ...”

“... Jung ascribed to Hitler, is probably worse, and probably less probable. For those familiar with Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the question is whether we’re in the hands of the existential-fool murderer Moosbrugger or the supercilious and beguiling industrialist Arnheim. But why choose? We should consider the possibility that Trump and his ...”