“... Farrant, and later by Oxford’s Boys, an amalgam of children’s companies put together by John Lyly, who was then secretary to the Earl of Oxford. Two elegant Lyly comedies, Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, were premiered there in 1584, but in that same year legal wrangles over the lease led to the closure of the theatre. If Shakespeare and his company ...”

“... of any literary stature were only too aware of the tradition of publishing correspondence. John Evelyn, for example, arranged his manuscript letter books to resemble a collection on the classical model. The privacy of the letter was a vexed issue. Once cast into the mailbag it was lost to the sender but might never arrive: ‘I am very uneasy about the ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... The American philosopher John Dewey thought that democracy should be like a giant conversation: the nation talking to itself about its hopes and fears and listening to what other people have to say. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) for Dewey, he never got to hear what such a conversation might sound like, because the technology wasn’t available ...”

“... instead to provide scraps of gossip that might give insights into his character and conversation. John Aubrey related that Shakespeare was the son of a butcher who ‘when he killed a calf would do it in high style, and make a speech’. By the early 18th century, Shakespearean biography was turning into something of an industry, with an indiscriminate ...”

“... acutely aware of their linguistic distinctiveness, signalled in the first edition of the Rev. John Jamieson’s influential Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published in 1808-09. Carlyle, the sage of Craigenputtock, had not stayed there, but in literary London he retained and exploited his outsider’s sense of his own alien speech and ...”

“... 1640, 24 years after Shakespeare’s death. That edition, however, involved wholesale revision. John Benson, the publisher, capitalising on the undiminished sales of Venus and Adonis, produced a volume of what looked to be not old-fashioned sonnets but new Shakespeare love poems. The transformation involved both format and erotics: many of the sonnets are ...”

“... Julie’s domestic existence is shattered; in Enduring Love, Clarissa and Joe witness the death of John Logan as he falls from a balloon, are changed for ever, and spend the rest of the novel trying to absorb the consequences of the spectacle; Black Dogs is in part about how Bernard Tremaine, a politician, scientist and rationalist, drifts away from his ...”

“... in a little: ‘A hand or eye/By Hilliard drawn is worth an history/By a worse painter made,’ John Donne wrote in 1597. By a ‘history’ he means one of those big, populous, often Italian paintings much in demand among Elizabethan collectors – paintings you stand back from to see the drama of some mythological or biblical episode unfold. No one stands ...”

“... outposts, white ones sent to London from missions abroad – are full of entertaining examples. John Russell’s 1967 dispatch from Brazil begins: ‘Like the surface of the moon Rio is short of water, covered in dust and pocked with deep holes.’ American diplomats wrote of hotels in Xilin which provided contraception as standard and noted ‘no mention ...”

“... Vermont to write Talk of the Town, or to drop off new stories. Kincaid’s second book, Annie John, a collection of interrelated stories, was published as a novel in 1985, followed by Lucy in 1990 and The Autobiography of My Mother in 1996. The protagonist of Autobiography of My Mother is 70-year-old Xuela Claudette Richardson, daughter of a Carib mother ...”

“... from procuring slaves for New Spain to Arctic whaling. (In a similar way, the Darien Company and John Law’s Mississippi Company had seduced the Scottish and French states into backing failed colonies.) The ‘Bubble Act’ of 1720 neither prevented the bursting of the South Sea Company’s bubble when its overvalued shares collapsed in price nor stopped ...”

“... histories of politically active men of letters such as William Mitford, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, John Stuart Mill and George Grote.Relating the historical writing of 19th-century liberals and utilitarians to their political battles isn’t a new approach, and conceptually these are some of the least original parts of the book, with Murray content to add ...”

“... it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.A delicate issue. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing ...”

“... of years, when the people’s most elemental needs were in jeopardy, is minutely investigated by John Bohstedt. His method has been to scrutinise ‘an objective sample’ of the more than a thousand riots that broke out during 1790-1810, in order to discover how and why they occurred. They were too commonplace to be unduly upsetting, and it was rarely that ...”