“... The turn away from poetry began (Honan implies) with the marriage of ‘K’ to the uncongenial William Forster in 1850 and Arnold’s own marriage immediately afterwards. Arnold evidently came to his marriage bed pure, apart from some heart-lusting after the blue-eyed Marguerite and therapeutic masturbation (faithfully chronicled by Cecil Lang from ...”

“... time Thomas Hardy arrived in the city, already trained as an architect whose sympathies lay with William Morris (‘we are only trustees for those who come after’), the rebuilding of Rome, now the confident capital of Italy, had torn away the ancient fabric, leaving no space for accretions, whether of flora or of association. The shaggy figures of ...”

“... of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave. Dryden adapted Shakespeare, out of confidence and from a sense of necessity. I have chosen Hamlet as a point of comparison between them – a comparison, after all, provoked by Dryden himself – for a reason best given by anecdote. A very long while ago I found myself in the ...”

“... in her, of imagination against observation, which leads a poet like Tennyson to compare her to Shakespeare: a juxtaposition which is, on the face of it, and given their relative scale, as surprising in a different way as the junction with Kipling. But if we call Shakespeare our greatest literary artist, what makes him so ...”

“... Edward the Confessor built the first abbey, next to his palace at Westminster, in 1042, and William the Conqueror became the first king to be crowned in it, on Christmas Day 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III ...”

“... enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ... should you not rather propose that all power and domination should be given to the Lord?’ Sedgwick, like many others, was frank about the ...”

“... of nationality are caused by people wandering about. For example, the trial of the other Joyce – William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw – demonstrated that a man born in Brooklyn and brought up in Ireland could be hanged as a British traitor for war crimes committed in Germany. William Joyce and James Joyce had their British ...”

“... deadpan footnotes deploying quotations from the most hostile of them, a hapless classicist called William Wotton, with mock approval. Wotton, who was in fact a formidable scholar, came off looking fussy and dim. Another critic, the Swiss theologian Jean Le Clerc, enjoyed Swift’s textual pyrotechnics but craved stability of meaning: ‘An odd game … goes ...”

“... with a mixture of Olden Time curiosities, including ‘a chair which belonged to a branch of the Shakespeare family’, and such objects of entertainment as a Chinese street scene in waxwork with a barber shaving his customer’s head. In 1864 Aston Hall was taken over by Birmingham Corporation as the first municipally owned country house. It is often ...”

“... begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s ...”

“... they separated within ten months. Three years after that, she took up with the architect Edward William Godwin. They did not marry, but had a daughter and son together, and the expense of their upkeep drove her back to the stage. Her performance as Portia in The Merchant of Venice drew her to the attention of Henry Irving, an emerging actor-manager who ...”

“... colour and their own style, but, being natives of Stratford-upon-Avon, they had been force-fed Shakespeare all their lives and heartily wished he’d chosen some other birthplace. They wanted to talk about the Sisters of Mercy. Interpretations of the Gothic have shifted many times over the centuries, but as a cultural idiom it has usually attracted young ...”

“... now call English literature. The most spectacular instance is the only surviving first edition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, now at the Bodleian Library. ‘Frances wolfreston hor bouk’ is written in italics across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear ...”

“... was to keep the gold medallist’s name before the public while he was away. Behind it was Sir William Chambers’s handsome folio on Kew, recording the various garden features in Classical and exotic dress which Chambers partly designed and partly sponsored. Some of these are reflected in Soane’s book, but du Prey reveals another, less obvious ...”

“... In a chapter on animals in his Description of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne ...”