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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... are pragmatical opponents of the institutional tradition. They include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James, the later Wittgenstein and the later Heidegger, all philosophers who ‘want to keep the space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause’. Bacon once called wonder ‘broken knowledge’ – a definition that suits Rorty’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... entertain, mislead, console etc). The selections include Queen Charlotte Sophia chastising her son William for being ‘a true trifling character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There ...”

“... to know which peril to invoke, which would pay off best. In 1893 the prolific literary adventurer, William le Queux (sometime Honorary Consul for San Marino), published The Great War England in 1897, in which a Franco-Russian army invaded Britain, and followed it in 1905 with The Invasion of 1910, this time with jack-booted Prussians as the aggressors. This ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt ...”