“... in a number of ways. In his Shakespeare’s Impact on his Contemporaries, Ernst Honigmann took a hint from the socialist playwright Edward Bond, whose Bingo portrayed Shakespeare as guiltily complicit in contemporary social conflicts rather than serenely transcending them. Honigmann agreed that the biographical evidence supported a view of Shakespeare ...”

“... in the house on which to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island ...”

“... was out there, waiting to suck me in and forever control my destiny – but only if I let it. I took positive control over my life. There was a point not long ago when Dave Pelzer’s self-rescue manuals held the top three spots in the bestseller charts. In Britain, it is likely that one out of every 15 adults will have read a Pelzer book, and the ...”

“... RAF Fighter Command, and invited witnesses such as Stephen Darbishire, a schoolboy who in 1954 took photos of a UFO in Cumbria, to meet him at Buckingham Palace. He also amassed a large collection of books on the subject. Towards the end of his life, he read The Halt Perspective (2016), about the Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980, when several UFOs were ...”

“... Corso kitted himself out in a traffic-stopping zoot suit, squeezed $7000 into his pockets and took off for Florida. Later he would write about how money leaked away, slippery as mercury: ‘Money in every pocket, no wallet, no clip/I just bunch it up and stuff it.’ Cash for Corso was always a dangerously occult commodity. ‘Money,’ he ...”

“... among other things, as an assault on an insular version of Ireland. The pogrom in Limerick, which took place in 1904, was incited by the fiery preaching of Father John Creagh to the arch-confraternity: The Jews came to Limerick apparently the most miserable tribe imaginable ... but now they had enriched themselves and ...”

“... On 1 February 1968 Eddie Adams took a photograph of the South Vietnamese chief of police standing in the street and shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head. The picture is listed on the web as one of the ‘100 photos that changed the world’. For years I thought that it recorded the blood spurting out of the side of the man’s head as the bullet went into his temple ...”

“... Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur Vandenberg in search of British genius, the story doesn’t fit. Secret meetings between the US, UK and Canada to ...”

“... a seminary, first for Catholics and then for Anglicans. Although the fellowship included John Foxe, whose Actes and Monuments (1563) was, for several centuries, the bestselling English book after the Bible, there were few scholars of note. But then the purpose of Oxbridge colleges in the 16th and 17th centuries ‘was to impart knowledge, not to ...”

“... Knossos, Italian violins, paintings from Uccello to Gainsborough, intricate dead clocks. Like Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, the Ashmolean was its own exhibit: a museum to display an essentially 18th-century collectors’ museum. That’s all gone. Behind the mighty old façade, the new design is more like MoMA in Manhattan. Piranesi with the lights ...”

“... novel about the content of these pictures. One showing a donor looking at a representation of St John baptising Christ is not very different in its basic theme from a painting by Titian half a century earlier. Donors were included, as they always had been, in order to invite the spectator to remember them when praying before the image. As the innkeeper in ...”

“... for educational levels) was 50 per cent higher than elsewhere, and executives of financial firms took home two and a half times what their counterparts earned in other sectors. Some areas of finance have cartel-like features, including high barriers to the entry of potential competitors. Where retail banking, say, has seen some recent new entrants, creating ...”

“... It’s called A Gentle Occupation.’ She placed it carefully on the coffee-table before her, took up her glass and drained it. ‘Lunch is at one. Punctually. Do you like my hair?’ ... A man at the table beside us finished his meal, pushed himself up with the aid of a white stick, adjusted a green plastic eye-shade over his fore-head, and inched from ...”

“... South is too parodic to be true, and too true to be only a parody. His earlier work Erasure (2001) took us to the same territory, although not so far south, and with more precarious modes of balance. Some of the comedy was transformed into straight horror and many of the horrors were not parodic in the least. They were all the more desolate for being so ...”

“... and Politics at the National Industrial Relations Court 1970-75 (Hart, £90) tells the story of John Donaldson, whose career might seem to provide an example of right-wing legal activism in the UK. As a young barrister in 1958, Donaldson co-wrote a policy paper produced by the Inns of Court Conservative and Unionist Society and given the title ‘A ...”