“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”

“... were much of a muchness. When the private cigarette parcels began to arrive, you could live like a king. I was fortunate enough to receive several at a time from relatives, friends and the firm where I worked. This enabled me to set up in business as an entrepreneur with business headquarters at my bed-space. The only drawback in being a tycoon was the fact ...”

“... such a transparent near-hoax, but that, they should have bothered with international law at all. Stephen Greenblatt, in Marvellous Possessions, makes a similar suggestion about Columbus’s remark that he was not contradicted – ‘y no me fué contradicho’ – when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish ...”

“... himself. Then came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of this piece – a ...”

“... selection provides a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi ...”

“... on, the boundary between flesh and cloth was indeterminate. According to the Book of Job, in the King James version, we are clothed in skin and flesh; but one might equally describe early modern men and women as fleshed in clothes. ‘To be laid out upon a petticoat’ meant to have sex. When Queen Elizabeth imagined the ultimate destitution she said she ...”

“... adoption. At the time of our separation from Great Britain, that power had been exercised by the king, as the chief executive . . . Hence, when the words to grant pardons were used in the Constitution, they conveyed to the mind the authority as exercised by the English crown, or by its representatives in the colonies. There is only one express departure ...”

“... is a thing that happened here. I just buried a young girl whose name was Stephanie, named for St Stephen, the patron of stonemasons, the first martyr. She died when she was struck by a cemetery marker as she slept in the back scat of her parents’ van as the family was driving down the interstate on their way to Georgia. It was the middle of the night. The ...”

“... and country clay. The poet wrote until his dying day. The final nail in the coffin came from Stephen Spender, Day Lewis’s old friend and longest surviving hydra head of Roy Campbell’s monstrous ‘MacSpaunday’, who admitted, writing in 1992 at the time of the long-awaited publication of Day Lewis’s Complete Poems, that while he admired the ...”

“... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...”

“... that during the school holidays his father would drop him off in the morning at a snooker club in King’s Cross before heading into Soho for work. The club was his crèche, he recalled fondly, though he admits it wasn’t ideal for a child to spend so much time around adults and cigarette smoke. He made his first century break – scoring more than a ...”

“... Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town perpetrating ...”

“... as part of that biographical evidence: Constance’s grief over the death of her son Arthur in King John must reflect Shakespeare’s grief at the death of his own son, Hamnet; a reference to cuckoldry in Sonnet 93 indicates that Anne Hathaway was unfaithful; and so on. As Shapiro comments, perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of his own life at those ...”

“... the city. Thousands died. But there was no surrender, and the city was finally relieved by the new king, William of Orange. Every year, the Orange Order, the Apprentice Boys and others celebrate the victory by burning an effigy of Lundy to shouts of ‘no surrender!’ Pinned to its chest is a sign that says: ‘Lundy the Traitor’. When Foster realised she ...”

“... of Forman’s writings and doings. She provides a thumbnail sketch of his life, in the spirit of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, more text than fact, but is convinced that he failed to achieve the goal of his self-construction, ‘a place in the power structure’. She is fine on his medical self-education, visible through his continuing ...”