“... suggest that a series of paintings might constitute an autobiography, let alone an analogue for King Lear? Did any sense of a ‘series’ exist for Rembrandt? Isn’t that simply a retrospective fancy in the minds of cataloguers and biographers, finally given concrete reality in this exhibition? This is exactly what the scholars behind the show want to ...”

“... Tedworth excited the interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were ...”

“... he’s lied under oath to the Congress of the United States. There’s no one left to lie to.’ Christopher Hitchens borrows Schippers’s scornful punch line for the title of his own screed against the President. Unperturbed by his proximity to right-wing Clinton-bashers like Schippers, Hitchens mounts a relentless and often compelling attack from the left ...”

“... and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the ...”

“... General Monck, who had addressed the restored Parliament and told them that bringing back the King would mean arbitrary power and the return of the prelacy, had now become a kingmaker. As Knoppers shows, political events in March 1660 did not move in the direction that Milton had hoped. Monck, as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, kept the remaining ...”

“... Castle, a plain inscription remembering him as ‘Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’. Greville’s life of Sidney, written in the earlier part of James’s reign, is a study in failure. ‘He never was magistrate, nor possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act upon.’ For ‘want of clear ...”

“... and political. Shortly after the Royal Society was founded in 1660, its leaders asked Petty and Christopher Wren ‘to consider the philosophy of shipping’, and the king himself urged Petty to turn his mind to naval matters. The mix of science and statecraft was compelling: Petty got down to work straight away. He wrote ...”

“... or celebrated, is ever much more than an aggrandised serf when it comes to dealing with his editor-king. Other letters here, testify to the fitful phenomenon that was Tynan’s generosity. His comments to Joseph Heller, after reading the proof copy of Good as Gold, or his pointers to Marlene Dietrich on how to write her autobiography, are rare and touching ...”

“... infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hour With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. The novel at a crucial point reaches the same mood as well as the identical locale; and Stetson’s corpses ‘planted last year in your garden’ are ...”

“... Levy’s latest book, a collection of his newspaper articles, reveals the man once dubbed ‘King Foodie’ in all his fullness. He is – and he knows it – a mild snob and a name-dropper, bumptious, provocative, opinionated and flippant. But there is even more to Levy than meets the eye. Behind the facetiousness, there is genuine wit, as in his ...”

“... anonymous, sponsored by Thomas Cromwell. The antagonist was an eminent and now elderly lawyer, one Christopher St German, and he was attacking the temporal jurisdiction of the Church through the existence and the practice of the ecclesiastical courts. Since he urged that these courts be brought under the control of the ...”

“... Purgatory. And, not exactly by the way, there is a liturgical reference, turned up by the Jesuit Christopher Devlin in Hamlet’s Divinity (1963), behind Hamlet’s first exclamation when he sees the Ghost: ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’ Devlin had a different liturgical source for ‘hic et ubique’, but I think Greenblatt’s is the more ...”

“... was they who secured its posthumous publication, when, after numerous rejections all round London, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, to his enormous credit, acquired it for Hamish Hamilton, who published it, with Fowles’s introduction, in 1981. It grieves me that I wasn’t aware of its publication at the time, because surely I would have loved it then as I ...”

“... took a little too much pleasure in the delinquencies she spotted. She once stole a badge from Christopher Hitchens that said ‘All the Right Enemies’. Choosing whom to hate is an exact science for the enterprising biographer. With an excessive and portable moral hauteur, the intrepid muckraker tends to find subjects whose awfulness plays well with the ...”

“... has been extradited to the United States on fraud charges (which he denies). The Tory donor Christopher Moran, at 259, who only has £620 million, £20 million more than King Charles, is the owner of the Chelsea Cloisters, better known as ‘ten floors of whores’.Whether you’re a steel magnate or a lottery ...”