“... after the dope, the hair, the music and the flowery rhetoric flowed free, those of us who were young enough to inhabit the land of spiked milk and honeyed hash fudge are in our forties and fifties. Which is only to be expected, although, of course, it was the last thing that anyone did, in fact, expect. There’s nothing more difficult to get a solid grip ...”

“... The​ Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus liked to look on the bright side. True, that hasn’t been the usual assessment: his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was intended to drench the parade of Enlightenment optimism about human possibility. The Radical writer Richard Price reckoned that an expanding population was a good thing, and that it would follow inevitably from more virtuous forms of government ...”

“... you would hardly think so from his portrait. The earliest dateable likeness is the engraving by Robert Vaughan, done in the mid 1620s, when Jonson was around fifty. The face is jowly, bearded, dour, heavily lived-in. The shadowed eyes remind me of photos of Tony Hancock. Comedy, they seem to say, is no laughing matter. It was one of Jonson’s sayings that ...”

“... we’re talking fiction or fact. Five of Melissa Bank’s stories feature the same heroine, a young woman called Jane Rosenal. The first two Jane stories are classical middle-class American Eastern seaboard tales of teenage nostalgia, with penny loafers and sailing expeditions and little clams. The middle two are transitional, with a much-older-man ...”

“... is some poetic licence: John Low is the centre of attention, even when he’s off-stage. As a young man, Low just missed being caught up in the mutinies at Vellore and Ellore, and in 1811 he saw 15 minutes of battle at Cornelis as part of Lord Minto’s expedition to take Java from the Dutch. Mount gives each of the three episodes a chapter, despite ...”

“... just top-quality calfskin. It was ‘virgin parchment, such as never bore hair’: the skin of ‘young things found in the dam’s belly’ – Hilliard called it ‘abortive’ vellum. It was carefully stretched and smoothed, then pasted onto card. Many of his miniatures are backed with playing cards: sometimes the face of the card is left visible so a ...”

“... John Robert Seeley was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge between Kingsley and Acton. One of the few eminent Victorians who inspired no memorial biography, he was best remembered as the author of The Expansion of England (1883), a sweeping historical manifesto in favour of the unification of the British Empire ...”

“... from looped cords or ribbons. A Lilliputian pair by Hilliard showing Elizabeth I and her favourite Robert Dudley nestles in the palm of a mannequin’s hand in a manner that instantly, and vividly, communicates their exceptionally small size – and by extension, hinting at the frisson of secrecy that must have accompanied their exchange.Other miniatures are ...”

“... after​ Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, a book called The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace was published, describing one New Jersey man’s dual existence as a top student at Yale and an incorrigible drug dealer.1 Peace was an alarmingly precocious black boy whose mother toiled in hospital kitchens to raise the money to send him to ...”

“... of bringing the wanderer back into the fold, and his mother urging him to join Mr Nicholson’s young men’s Bible class. During the summer he escaped to Cockfield Rectory in Suffolk, the home of his cousin Maud Babington, and there, in this impressionable mood, he fell passionately in love with the beautiful Frances Jane Sitwell – a woman ten years ...”

“... There have been many short surveys, but no serious study of this important subject until Professor Robert Finlay’s new book. Political historians have preferred to study Florence, partly, perhaps, because the Florentines were always changing their constitution (Dante compared the city to an invalid in bed, always changing her position and always ...”

“... leather industry provided a livelihood, not only for Marlowe’s family, but also for that of Robert Greene and William Shakespeare, sons respectively of a Norwich saddler and a Stratford glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial ...”

“... it comes at the weary end of a line that stretches through books by Peter Blake, Brent Brolin, Robert Venturi and others right back to Jane Jacobs’s epoch-breaking attack on Le Corbusier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, over twenty years ago. Of course, all this has guaranteed Wolfe a readership whose anti-modern reflexes had been well ...”

“... propagated Scottish notions of liberty, improvement, politeness and sentimentality. Rather as Robert Darnton a generation ago diverted scholarly attention from the philosophes to the printers, engravers and booksellers of Paris in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, so Sher looks through all that Scottish mind ...”

“... Logorrhoea:​ Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised soliloquies. The one I remember best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish) and the song ‘Penny Lane ...”