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“... The subtitle of James Shapiro’s engaging new book is a tease. Shapiro, the author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), is in no doubt that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon is the author of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th century ...”

“... the Majestic as the fiancé of Angela Spencer, the eldest daughter of the hotel’s widowed owner, Edward. The Major’s relationship with Angela is largely epistolary – he has dim memories of kissing her in Brighton while on leave, and of afterwards steadying himself on a cactus, ‘which had rendered many of his parting words insincere’ – and though he ...”

“... into the Weekly Illustrated, and went on to found a magazine of his own, Lilliput. He sold it to Edward Hulton, for whom he was to set up a new paper, a weekly illustrated magazine, which escaped being called Lo! and became Picture Post. Hopkinson joined Lorant when the magazine was being planned, and worked with him until Lorant went to America in ...”

“... Gwen John’s attic bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room, Adolf Menzel’s open window and blowing curtain, Andrew Wyeth’s New England rooms full of cold, hard light, Hammershøi’s frugal Danish ones and Van Gogh’s narrow bedroom: these are pictures you might choose if exiled to a desert island. Thinking of the inviting effect such paintings have I went looking for them in the National Gallery ...”

“... had a second act after losing the election of 1964, serving as foreign secretary under Edward Heath. These are the lucky ones. A different fate awaited Jim Callaghan, who drifted into a burdensome obscurity after losing the 1979 election and resigning as Labour leader the following year. There is a sad letter from him in the LRB archive, responding ...”

“... Henry James met Rupert Brooke on a visit to Cambridge in June 1909, having been invited there by some young admirers who made him feel, he wrote in a letter, ‘rather like an unnatural intellectual Pasha visiting his Circassian Hareem’. Brooke, in a white shirt and white flannel trousers, took charge of a punting trip on the Cam ...”

“... in line. The Army was not literary London. In the military scale of things, the likes of General James and Colonel Conrad would, of course, look down on him. At the same time, salutes were guaranteed from Privates Lawrence, Pound and Eliot; even from Lance-Corporal Lewis. And in the Army, you got paid: paid every week, not just when you happened to get lucky ...”

“... fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and ...”

“... physiology and the Book of Genesis), it could not conceivably support life. The Manx naturalist Edward Forbes coined the word ‘azoic’ to describe this self-evidently lifeless zone. By the 1870s he and other oceanographers were eating their words as improved sampling technology retrieved abundant evidence that, in cheerful defiance of human ...”

“... that sprang up in Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s.) The killings in the title of Marlon James’s novel – a novel that’s built around the attempt on Marley’s life much as Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) are built around the Kennedy assassination – turn out, after ...”

“... biographical material, such as Eloise Knapp Hay’s The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, and Edward Said’s Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, nor to list the various collections of Conrad’s letters which have been published since Jean-Aubry’s Life and Letters. Professor Karl is aware of all this work and he has made extensive use of it ...”

“... Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest son, Edward; when he went up to Oxford she moved the whole family along with him, and continued there with him, and still kept him in a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him ...”

“... When Samuel Johnson, travelling in the Highlands with James Boswell, reaches Loch Ness, he is so overwhelmed by the massiveness of the landscape that the heavy order of his prose is briefly disarrayed. On his right, there are high and steep rocks, and on his left deep water laps against the bank in ‘gentle agitation ...”

“... is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels rather boring and melodramatic, has decided that elderly authors ...”

“... pages of a book. All his life he was desperately concerned about appearances. He fired the poet James Thomson from the paper he edited for drunkenness (‘The City of Dreadful Night’ first appeared in Bradlaugh’s National Reformer). And though he was more or less in love with his long-time collaborator Annie Besant (and she desperately so with ...”