“... to give to prove divinity, & that Marlowe told him that he hath read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others’. The informer then goes on to itemise some of Cholmeley’s ‘horrible & damnable speeches’, many of which closely echo the blasphemies attributed by Baines to Marlowe. Another thing the Note and the Remembrances have in common is ...”

“... from the discussion of Wilde’s Gwendolen on the name ‘Ernest’ (‘the only safe name’) to Walter Shandy’s high hopes from ‘Trismegistus’ for his little son, in Sterne. Similarly, in a book haunted by cats, we never learn whether ‘Tybalt’ (‘prince of cats’) really does mean ‘cat’. From this one might have stepped to the extreme ...”

“... among others, Foucault, Habermas, Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre and Derrida. Currently Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard, he came of philosophical age in the early Fifties, in a milieu where the very idea of professing, say, a ‘general theory of value’ – never mind composing ‘autobiographical ...”

“... of moon and sun-worship and fertility-ritual – in effect, the Key to All Mythologies for which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon had so fruitlessly sought. Frazer’s The Golden Bough had shown how such a key could be announced to the world: not as a poetic revelation, but in the secular modern form of a scholarly treatise. In The Greek Myths, Graves suppresses ...”

“... and the period inaugurated by the Reformation. The occasional invocation of T.S. Eliot and of Walter Benjamin (whose ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ Docherty misreads as the age of the printing press rather than of photography and sound recording) adds further terminological lubrication. In his earlier book John Donne, Undone (1986) Docherty poured ...”

“... Crown, and set the tone for British Neo-Latin verse in the later 16th century. The Latin works of George Buchanan won him an international audience, and pulses of Protestant resistance theory run through his Latin dramas on Biblical themes. In the first half of the 17th century most major English poets – Herbert, Milton, Marvell, Crashaw, Cowley – were ...”

“... idealist. Under Haley’s enlightened rule, the triumvirate of Etienne Amyot, Leslie Stokes and George Barnes built an inspirational Third Programme that had initially to withstand a number of technical troubles – among them, the appropriation by Soviet Latvia of the waveband originally assigned to it – before it became the ‘envy of the ...”

“... immediately. The next day a makeshift fence surrounded it. ‘Baudelaire loved solitude,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘but he wanted it in a crowd.’ Today any area that might attract a crowd has shut down and Governor Cuomo frowns on walks. You can still find ‘crowds’, but they’re made up of people you already know but can’t risk seeing ‘in ...”

“... question asking for Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is a Losing Game’ to be compared with a ballad by Walter Raleigh. Here, in a lecture on comic timing, Griffiths reads a passage from Swift’s True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London alongside an article from the Evening Standard. Swift’s satire imagines the behaviour of various inhabitants of ...”

“... 1938, and won by four lengths by Seabiscuit. He was ridden on that occasion by a back-up jockey, George Woolf, his regular jockey, Red Pollard, having broken his leg galloping a wild young racehorse as a favour to a friend. Seabiscuit is well aware of the cultural baggage the horse was carrying with him: the ‘little horse’ drew more newspaper coverage in ...”

“... Is this the period, then, when Britain became a property-owning democracy? Was it a nation of Walter Mittys tending their herbaceous borders while dreaming of derring-do? In other words, should Pugh replace Orwell on college reading lists and in the popular mind? The answer is no. Pugh’s book is engaging and full of illuminating vignettes, but as a ...”

“... Even so, it is crammed with intriguing data. We learn that it was the journalist Walter Lippmann who introduced the term ‘stereotype’ into American culture; that Marx always judged the mental qualities of a stranger from the shape of his head, which may be carrying materialism a bit too far; and that so-called nigger minstrels in the ...”

“... Welles anticipated Andy Warhol, who also enjoys a posthumous existence as a movie character.) George Orson Welles was born in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York theatregoers in the 1930s and who, when not spooking radio listeners as the ...”

“... cable, 301 miles long, is laid in the bed of the Black Sea, stretching from the monastery of St George, in the Crimea, to Kalerga, on the Bulgarian shore. Information about the course of the war was brought to the British public with great speed by the Times’s Applegath rotary printing press, which could deliver ten thousand impressions an hour. It’s ...”

“... and early modern Catholicism. Building on the work of Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Véronique Dasen, George Galavaris and Aden Kumler, he takes in not only objects of devotion and theological works but also lives of saints, ephemeral printed matter, even culinary implements.The premodern cosmos was structured by mysterious correspondences which modern scholars ...”