“... warlords. At the height of the 17th-century Time of Troubles, the Kremlin was occupied by a Polish king and supported by a predominantly Polish army. (Imagine an Irish king installed in the Tower of London by an Irish-French army, supported by English Catholics and given diplomatic backing by the Vatican; English national ...”

“... needs to have an old orchard and a couple of herbaceous borders. The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751) locates its perfect society in ‘spacious vales and lofty mountains, pleasant verdure and groves of stately trees’. This particular utopia smells good, whereas most of them are odourless, antiseptic places, intolerably streamlined and ...”

“... in strength throughout the 1300s. Already in the 1380s, a group of embroiderers petitioned the king as ‘les Brouderers de la Citye de Londres’. In 1495, perhaps in response to undercutting, the Broderers petitioned to the mayor and aldermen of London that no citizen embroiderer should employ a foreign craftsman, except if granted permission from the ...”

“... to Ian)? Was Barbara Skelton having an affair with the Polish war artist Feliks Topolski when Peter Quennell came onto the scene, still married to his third wife, Glur, but making Topolski so jealous that the men resorted to fisticuffs over Barbara? What made Janetta, still married to Hugh Slater, fall in love with Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, and would that ...”

“... be in his play. The real Macbeth, though said to have murdered Duncan, was otherwise a good enough king, as kings went in those days ... and he gained the respect of his people.’ Respect and respectability are what counts. Crawfie, for all the scandal of the publication of her book, was no scandalmonger, and wouldn’t hear a word said against royalty, not ...”

“... on principle, practising conviction politics with missionary zeal at governess pitch. For Peter Riddell, writing elsewhere, Thatcherism is ‘essentially an instinct, a sense of moral values and an approach to leadership rather than an ideology, an expression of Mrs Thatcher’s upbringing in Grantham, her background of hard work and family ...”

“... the wayfaring man ceaseth.’ Rural England left nothing like the same mark on posterity as She or King Solomon’s Mines, but he said it cost him more labour than anything else.This wasn’t the first time that arable farmers had fallen victim to abrupt economic and technological change against which they proved powerless, both individually and ...”

“... The land God gave to Cain’ was how Jacques Cartier, sailing under patronage of the French king in 1534, described what came to be Canada’s province of Newfoundland and Labrador. Cain is exactly the kind of character who interests Annie Proulx, and Cain’s home turf is the natural setting for her fiction. Cain more or less shows up, under the name of Loyal Blood, as the protagonist of her first novel Postcards ...”

“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”

“... so proudly as to approve the abolition of academic study lacking in immediate ‘relevance’. Peter Acton throws out a red herring on page one – ‘agriculture was the real capitalism, contributing to social inequality’ – but agriculture and class analysis are both wilfully absent here. Poiesis is a book about making things and selling ...”

“... where, among others regularly passing the (obligatory) potatoes, were Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Carson McCullers, Lincoln Kirstein and Gipsy Rose Lee. When love comes to the confirmed bachelor old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit ...”

“... they have been and remain oppressive, and those – here, primarily theatre practitioners such as Peter Sellars, Anchuli Felicia King and Keith Hamilton Cobb – who still find enabling possibilities in their performance. (Sellars has a fascinating exchange with Ayanna Thompson in which they discuss the paradoxical ...”

“... Russell on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an ...”

“... all the poetry. None of these books has the scope or importance of Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era. Peter Ackroyd’s Ezra Pound and His World brings together 111 photographs, drawings and other illustrations and offers a linking text summarising the poet’s life and literary career. The biography – inevitably, I suppose – draws heavily on the work of ...”

“... the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to sing ...”