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“... find little pleasure or stimulation in those few selections from Dryden we now ask them to read.’ The difficulty is not confined to students, or to recent times. ‘I admire his talents and Genius highly, but his is not a poetical Genius,’ Wordsworth said; perhaps predictably, since his notion of poetry differed from Dryden’s as much as Romantic ...”

“... are pivotal in nearly all her plots. Conversation Piece (1932) is so horsey it feels wrong to read it anywhere but in the saddle. Hunting was a passport to a social life in 1920s and 1930s Anglo-Irish society, and therefore a route, too, to romance, sex and marriage – although not necessarily all three, in that order, or with the same person. If you ...”

“... about materialism which is not itself materialist?’ Well, one answer to that might be to read another of Hall’s Marxism Today essays, published a year before the New Times project began: ‘When the left talks about crisis, all we see is capitalism disintegrating, and us marching in and taking over … [But] there is no law of history which can ...”

“... Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious oddballs found a small economic niche as ad hoc entertainers; they are haunters of St Paul’s Churchyard and the Inns of Court, of revels and convivia. We have no first-hand record of a Coryate ...”

“... easily have been devoted to somebody else. This is now a commonplace. Only the other day I had to read a ‘mini-bio’ of Shakespeare, done by a graduate student, which began with an authoritative statement: ‘The work of William Shakespeare was evenly matched with many other authors in Elizabethan and Jacobean society, but modern opinion emphasises his ...”

“... exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the ...”

“... at Roglit in Israel, the largest assemblage of names on any memorial in the world. Names can be read and the duration of the reading measured as a sign of the magnitude of loss. The practice of reading names from monuments is, of course, not limited to the Holocaust. The names from the Vietnam Memorial, for example, are ...”

“... against himself. Being a deeply religious man, he prayed feverishly for God’s guidance. He’d read in a magazine that there was a way of sending yourself into a trance. You had to imagine yourself entering a warm white fog. He tried this out, and the images came to him. ‘I would’ve removed her underpants or bottoms to the nightgown ... I would’ve ...”

“... what he called ‘the epic quest for oil, money and power’ in the 20th century, was an excellent read. The Commanding Heights is equally racy. With an army of assistants in Washington, he and Stanislaw have read a decent number of the published sources, talked to many interested people in the United States, and to 88 of ...”

“... friend Scrope Davies. The latter series, dated 1809-19, are more obviously entertaining. To read them after the Greek letters is to be carried back to the Byron of the delightful third volume of the letters, that real-life Liaisons Dangereuses which covered the episode in 1813 when Byron was having an affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, and ...”

“... of squibs, Unsent Letters. But other identifications are not as easily laughed off. Anyone who has read Eating people is wrong and who knew the late Arthur Humphries (professor of English at Leicester, where Bradbury got his first degree) must suspect that the novel’s hero, Stuart Treece, is a portrait from life. Nor could one believe that the portrait ...”

“... scripts of the earliest Middle Ages, with a sleek and limpid Caroline minuscule that anyone can read today after a few minutes’ practice. More than two-thirds of the ancient Latin literature we have today was in circulation under Charlemagne’s heirs in the ninth century, and not much that enjoyed a Carolingian revival was subsequently lost. But the ...”

“... The moment had come to fix the blame where it properly belonged: not on Lyndon Johnson, not on Richard Nixon, but, as Burke points out, on the oldest story in the world, ‘the seductive woman who turns out to be a snake’. Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto their shaky ...”

“... but he was rarely in a position to do his own research. Today only his most dedicated fans will read the Pseudodoxia from cover to cover, but it’s useful for showing how gradually the practices we have come to think of as scientific method emerged from older ways of thinking. Wittgenstein, speaking of the transition between his earlier and later ...”

“... the fascinating account of the colonisation of Barbados published in 1657 by the English agent Richard Ligon. Many planters remained nervous about bringing religion to their slaves in the 18th century. Even as some argued that Africans were naturally inferior to whites, planters feared they would lose their powers to enslave when their workers became ...”