“... subpoenaed by Mueller. Some protection may be afforded Trump by his nominee as attorney general, William Barr, a right-wing Republican who believes in a strong chief executive; on 14 February Barr was confirmed by the Republican Senate, and he will work to keep Trump in office. The interesting question is whether he will allow the Mueller findings to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... reinscribes the theory. When Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his erratic and self-regarding William Shakespeare,† declares that ‘from a phallocentric viewpoint a woman appears to have nothing between her legs,’ and sets up his account of the great tragedies by stressing man’s ‘unconscious thoughts of his own possible castration’ – so that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... The Revenger’s Tragedy, 1606) and John Fletcher. In his Jew’s Tragedy, written in the 1620s, William Heminges even includes the line ‘To be, or not to be, I, there’s the doubt.’ Perhaps he thought that as the son of one of the compilers of the 1623 Shakespeare folio, which prints a more streamlined and performance-friendly revised text of Hamlet ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”