“... address themselves. There is some overlap here with the first part of Political Shakespeare (PS), whose editors contribute the concluding essays of the Methuen volume. Their main concern is with the social and institutional context of Shakespeare’s plays, both in his own age and in modern Britain. Marxism is here the dominant intellectual ...”

“... Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, a law and order manifesto for a very nasty party. If Tom Jones had encountered this Fielding in his rambles round Britain, a longish novel would have become a short story. Tom’s sexual transgressions were matters for the ecclesiastical courts, but he was a poacher, an idler unwilling to earn his living by regular ...”

“... will simultaneously become convinced that their daughter ‘looks like’ a Joanna or a Niamh. P.G. Wodehouse apparently took the name Jeeves from a Warwickshire cricketer. Did the name sound right for a valet simply because it rhymes with ‘sleeves’? Wodehouse became rich by sounding ultra-British to an American readership. Perhaps ‘Jeeves’ so well ...”

“... for Lord Hay’s Masque – almost certainly devised by the pre-eminent artist of the genre, Inigo Jones – followed in this tradition: its action opened on a magnificent prospect of woodland, with a Bower of Flora, a House of Night and Diana’s Tree of Chastity, in front of which danced nine 15-foot golden trees. At the end of the dance, each tree opened to ...”

“... evidence of the Hills’ reliability.The UFO Incident, a film about the Hills, starring James Earl Jones as Barney and Estelle Parsons as Betty, was broadcast by NBC in October 1975, bringing their story to millions of American households. It suited the paranoid mood of the times. Two weeks after watching it, Travis Walton, a forestry worker, was reported ...”

“... was a wellknown amateur singer; a stately woman who had been painted by Sargent, had been one of Edward VII’s mistresses and appears to have had the archetypal Edwardian capacity to carry on liaisons without upsetting the seemly surface of her life. At 58, however, she often felt ‘seedy’ and the 35-year-old Hall impatient and restless. In May 1916 ...”

“... and unimaginative. It was generally felt that the cover was awful. We voted to pulp it and D.A.N. Jones, later of the LRB, walked out. We’d lost the editor. I was asked to take over and with designer Robin Fior looking over my shoulder I wrote: we shall fight, we will win: Paris, London, Rome, Berlin. The vote was unanimous. We were for Utopia. To raise ...”

“... drawings were presented to me by a very ill man,’ the catalogue entry read, quoting Edward Adamson, the art therapist who first encountered J.J. Beegan in 1946. By the time they met, Adamson explained, Beegan ‘had been in a locked ward in the hospital for many years. He was incontinent and unable to speak clearly. He drew vigorously on the ...”

“... the forgotten multitudes resurrected by Parker are some appealing characters. I especially enjoyed PC Butcher, one of two plainclothes constables who gave extended evidence to the committee about activity in men’s toilets in Mayfair and Soho. They provide a description of what went on that is unrivalled, in these volumes, by any account by an actual queer ...”

“... that Kennedy’s address to the nation on 22 October 1962 would be an abdication speech, à la Edward VIII, announcing his love for Debo. The Cuban Missile Crisis came as a terrible disappointment. Two years later, when Hons and Rebels topped the bestseller lists alongside Joy Adamson’s Born Free, Diana wrote to the TLS calling it ‘grotesque’, while ...”

“... geologist, claimed to have seen hundreds of fairies dancing in a ring in his garden. Edmund Jones, a minister in Aberystruth, collected dozens of contemporary eyewitness accounts of fairy activity in Wales. Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth was in many ways an exemplary scientific investigation of the phenomenon of ‘second sight’. The ...”

“... mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself. ‘Nobody ever flung it at me during the war that I was associating with people who were infinitely my social ...”

“... content. He was not the only actor of his age to have developed a ‘great melody’ – Edward Gibbon was another – but he has to be known in this way, and Dr O’Brien has set out to depict the ‘great melody’ as formed by what he was and by the grand issues – the themes to which the subtitle alludes – to which he gave himself. This is not ...”

“... problematic. With respect to the first, the hacking charges are unproved and may well remain so. Edward Snowden and others familiar with the NSA say that if long-distance hacking had taken place the agency would have monitored it and could detail its existence without compromising their secret sources and methods. In September, Snowden told Der Spiegel that ...”

“... of Lord Justice O’Connor, whose account of his contacts with the Conservarive Party leader Sir Edward Carson in January 1921 are especially interesting. O’Connor reported that he ‘understood Carson to be in favour of ultimate unity, through the means of the Council of Ireland set up under the Home Rule Act’ and gave details of two further meetings ...”