“... This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man who shot him’; Baudelaire’s ‘king of the blue’ brought ‘stumbling and ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are ...”

“... Spanish. The conceit of Facing East from Indian Country that we are looking west to east, at what Francis Jennings entitled The Invasion of America, is the weakest part of what is in many ways a very good book. Stripped of its pretences, this is much less an account of how Indians would have viewed the colonial experience than a synthesis of thirty years of ...”

“... minorities in its midst’. The English preferred, in the words of the governor of Virginia, Sir Francis Wyatt, ‘to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thorns in our sides’. The Spanish south, by contrast, was colonised by aristocrats and would-be aristocrats, whose wealth and self-image relied heavily on the existence of a highly stratified ...”

“... the Sheriff of Nottingham. He is an archer of genius and a master of disguise. He is loyal to the king, and ‘dyde pore men moch god’, but he had no time for the wealthy and grasping religious orders: the Gest begins with the story of how Robin helped an impoverished knight pay his debt to the abbot of St Mary’s York, and fleeced the abbey in the ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic ...”

“... emotion – in fact, for Miss Harrison’s soppy side: the Brownings, the Brontës, Alice Meynell, Francis Thompson, Tagore’s ‘King of the Dark Chamber’ and ‘The Post Office’. When Charlotte Mew found her individual voice, all these influences persisted, just as her school friends remained her first and last refuge ...”

“... close friend of men and women of the intellectual calibre of Bentham, the young John Stuart Mill, Francis Jeffrey, until recently editor of the Edinburgh Review, the Grotes, the Romillys, the Carlyles. A more weighty anchor to conventionality was her ten-year-old daughter Lucy. All this was now put in jeopardy by these dangerous letters. Inadvertent or ...”

“... the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. Johnson begins his Life of ...”

“... too, and takes off on an extraordinary literary ramble from which it never returns and in which Francis Coppola and his team seem to have decided to do The Golden Bough as their Christmas pantomime. The confused ending weighs on the film but doesn’t wreck it, so we don’t need to hush up the confusion or pretend it isn’t confusion at all. Apocalypse ...”

“... to the soul’, though not everyone has been convinced the window is transparent. In Macbeth, King Duncan confesses that he has disastrously misread the traitorous Thane of Cawdor: ‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’ But the audience at the Globe knew very well that such an art was widely advertised and practised, even if ...”

“... on Jones’s shoulder in the crowded courthouse and pronouncing: ‘I declare this man free in the king’s name.’ The Baymen were obliged to concede; they were, however, past masters at using their economic leverage to influence the British government. They bombarded the Home Office with letters alleging that Despard was destroying the mahogany trade by ...”

“... canes, ‘hounds of the Lord’. The other major grouping among the friars, the followers of Francis, also staffed inquisitions but, as Black points out, Franciscans rapidly lost their already minority share of the inquisitor market during the 16th century. So there were inquisitions long before there was the Inquisition. And in fact there never was ...”

“... air of Artifice, bottom perched – very hesitantly – on the disconnected image-complex … As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘le seul moyen d’agir est le moyen que j’ai choisi: d’écrire.’In his introduction Gareth Farmer points out that what Ponge actually wrote was ‘le seul moyen d’agir et non d’être agi’: writing is the only way to act and ...”

“... often included figurative and allegorical representations: ‘The “chemical wedding” of solar king and lunar queen might represent the alchemical process of conjunction – the physical joining of gold and silver – or suggest an analogy for the mysterious and unseen bonds between substances, now envisioned in terms of human desire.’ Naked men and ...”

“... and, occasionally, terror. Halley’s comet appears on the Bayeux Tapestry as a harbinger of King Harold’s doom. It was probably first spotted by the ever-watchful Chinese. In 840 AD an imperial edict in China forbade astronomers to mix ‘with civil servants and common people in general’ lest their knowledge of these terrible objects incite popular ...”