“... as the man who dared censor Don Juan. When Byron gives the third instalment of Don Juan to John Hunt, Murray sounds agonised. MacCarthy calls it ‘heartbreak’. The pained letters of Byron’s women are often mentioned but rarely quoted. There are odd, telling exceptions. When MacCarthy transcribes a nostalgic pencilled note from Byron’s former servant ...”

“... began prosaically enough, with the News of the World’s revelation on 6 November 2005 that Prince William had strained his knee. Its source – William’s voicemail – didn’t make the scoop much more remarkable; British redtops had been listening in to royal phone calls for more than ten years, and earlier tap-and-tell ...”

“... suggests how reading implicates the whole person. Yet there are dangers in promoting touch. Leigh Hunt finely praised ‘Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is such,/That it seems to feel truth, as pure matter of touch,’ but the Romantic cult of touch as a medium of truth would lead to D.H. Lawrence, a writer with a number of disconcerting points of ...”

“... translation it could almost be the beginning of an 18th-century epistolary novel; even more so in William Melmoth’s version from 1746: ‘I propose pursuing the remainder of my journey to the province partly in light vessels, and partly in post-chaises.’) Pliny didn’t collect and arrange the 121 letters in Book Ten himself: his audience is not posterity ...”

“... how accurate he believes early prescriptions were) and that not too many heirs followed Mrs Holman Hunt, who changed the concave lenses of her husband’s spectacles for convex ones to conceal his myopia from posterity, a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck ...”

“... years. But Honigmann has now revived, and extended, a theory that had seemed exploded: that the ‘William Shakeshafte’ who appears in the will of Alexander Hoghton, a Lancashire landowner, in 1581 was the young dramatist. The major new fact with which Honigmann backs up the theory is that John Cottom, who was for a time a schoolmaster at Stratford, appears ...”

“... on the grounds that they were ‘slummy’. O’Brian became an ardent follower of the local hunt, but didn’t get much writing done and seems to have come close to having a breakdown. In 1949 he and Mary moved abruptly to Collioure, where he began to write, and she to type, with astonishing tenacity, and he was able to rig up a self in which ...”

“... didn’t deter Teruzzi from making an impulsive visit to Varese, where Lilliana was rehearsing for William Tell, and proposing to her. She rebuffed him: ‘Please, I think of you as a friend.’ He left, furious.It would be nice to imagine that this cultured American had woken up to the unpleasantness of her suitor’s politics, but that wasn’t, alas, the ...”

“... cities, power plants and oil installations.Kaplan was responsible for raising the reputation of William Kaufmann, a civilian nuclear strategist and critic of massive retaliation. Another RAND corporation man and an influential adviser to the Department of Defence on nuclear matters, Kaufmann argued that threatening to respond to minor aggression with total ...”

“... like the bridegroom victimised by the succuba in “Ode”.’ We are a long way from the dogged hunt for allusions to grail myths and fertility rituals of earlier generations of Eliot scholars. Miller attempts no such theoretical arabesques. He is more like a McCarthy-inspired gumshoe than a queer theory exegete. He just wants to persuade his readers that ...”

“... Victorian literary and artistic worlds: his maternal grandfather was Ford Madox Brown, his uncle William Michael Rossetti. The only possible career for the children of these classes was that of a genius. Ford’s Rossetti cousins had written Greek dramas at the ages of five, nine and fourteen respectively. It became his duty always to aspire to ...”

“... Britten only managed, at best, three. He often went to sleep with a score by his pillow. It was a hunt for only one prey, a journey of monotonous distinction, which never really widened. Throughout these biographies, and notwithstanding Britten’s splendid ear for verse, one has little sense of the composer taking much interest in any art but music.Britten ...”

“... where, after some rummaging (there are not even any running heads with page numbers to make the hunt easier), we find the note: ‘William Wordsworth (1770-1850), poet laureate from 1843’. It is almost impossible to reconstruct the conception of readers and their needs that can have led to the insertion of these ...”

“... and ossified that it required six generations of nobility to be allowed to follow the king’s hunt. A petition to be received at Versailles was turned down on the grounds that a member of the vicomte’s family had been found to have usurped their title in 1667.Joséphine, too, was rebuffed in her early attempts to restyle herself for life in Paris. The ...”

“... spaces where they had previously been completely absent, preservationists like John Ruskin and William Wordsworth (‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’). The agents of Network Rail, who are building the Ordsall Chord, can and do portray themselves playing the Stephenson role. They claim originality: the bridge, an arch with a ...”