“... Three months before plague struck Stratford, a young woman named Mary gave birth there to a son, William. She and her husband had lost their first two children, Joan and Margaret, in infancy. The prospects for their newborn’s survival – and perhaps their own – must have seemed grim. Just a few doors down from their home on Henley Street, their ...”

“... the vicar of Wreay, some papers in the Carlisle Record Office and the diaries of Losh’s uncle, James. For the modern biographer it is slim pickings, and Uglow takes the only possible course, which is to build up the background and the context in the hope that they will describe an outline in the foreground, a space that will suggest what Losh was like and ...”

“... by the RUC and B-Specials. The march heads away from the main entrance to Bogside emerging west of William Street, the last leg of the proposed route to the Guildhall. Passing the Bishop’s house, we notice the grey head nodding in a curtained window. Distance lends him enchantment. A Creggan woman in front of me curses the prelate: ‘Why isn’t he out here ...”

“... the time. Another way to phrase the same exam question would have been: ‘Have you read Margery James?’ I’m sure I hadn’t; I have now. I was reminded of the exam question when I went to the wine cellars at Berry Brothers & Rudd on St James’s Street in early December, and as I ordered ...”

“... was that Prince Albert had provided the definitive and approved working model. Robert Rhodes James has written an entertaining and effective but oddly out-of-kilter book about that model. His standard texts appear to be Justin McCarthy and H.A.L. Fisher, historians whose reputations had faded when Mr James was a ...”

“... At the end of his life, with his reputation already waning, William Dean Howells remarked that he would be remembered for the quantity of his writing, if not for its quality. He had published a hundred books: plays and poetry collections, memoirs and travel essays, novels and novellas. The plays are mostly undistinguished, the non-fiction writings good on the whole, the novels sharply divided between minor and major ...”

“... is the slightest of these three books, but it makes two important contributions to any reading of William Shakespeare’s life in Stratford. First, it places the career of William’s father John in the larger contexts of Stratford’s economic and demographic development, of the expanding Tudor class of individual ...”

“... politicians appear on CNN to lend support to American actions: Clinton, his Defense Secretary, William Cohen, and the National Security Director, Sandy Berger, all have their moment, as Foden annexes real-life speech. Berger’s explanation of the advantages of long-range missiles – they avoid ‘giving the show away’ – cues a moment of reflection as ...”

“... The individual who deserves most credit for its invention, the English clergyman and mathematician William Oughtred (1574-1660), came to believe the slide rule was dangerous since it removed the need for students to learn any underlying mathematical principles. ‘The true way of Art is not by Instruments, but by Demonstration,’ he complained. ‘It is a ...”

“... The Hazlitt of our time’, said the Manchester Guardian, announcing the death of James Agate in 1947. An extravagant compliment, but the famous theatre reviewer did have one or two of Hazlitt’s characteristics. Though his journalism now seems too pompous-frivolous even for the theatre world, his reports of actors’ performances are often vivid and persuasive: he was quite learned in his subject and could communicate his own enthusiasm, making drama seem important – more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today ...”

“... The quatercentenary commemorative King James Bible (KJB) sits on my desk as I write: a satisfying artefact in its chocolate livery enriched by opulently gilded top, tail and fore edges, with stout chocolate slipcase to match, impressive in its folio bulk, though not nearly as bulky as the originals of 1611, which needed a sturdy lectern to bear them, announcing their presence with a swagger equal to the most majestic of England’s medieval church buildings ...”

“... I am of that odious class of men called democrats,’ Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews in 1794. Much the same can be said of Coleridge, on the evidence of his letters and publications of the mid-1790s. By the early decades of this century, British, French and American scholarship concurred in finding both poets to be, in the 1790s, republicans and advanced reformers, who then suffered disappointment in the course of the French Revolution and, in different ways and at different times, changed their minds ...”

“... had an illegitimate child with Elizabeth Waller, the daughter of the Parliamentarian general, Sir William. The experiments of the 1650s were swept away as king, lords and bishops were thrust back into power with hardly a shot fired. The armies of the Commonwealth melted away, its tortured succession of governments abruptly ended and its chaotic Church ...”

“... well as business talent, to bring together A. E. W. Mason, George Douglas, Raffles, Gissing, Henry James and Jack London in the same series, and in the name of pleasure. One sees that the middlebrow had still not quite secured its grasp upon Britain. One’s sense of Buchan the man, as derived from the excellent and engaging memoir by his son ...”

“... 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 ...”