“... before and turned down an opportunity to meet General Ludendorff. Others were also worried: Thomas Mann noted that while ‘Wagner will never cease to interest me . . . Bayreuth as it now presents itself interests me not at all.’ Hamann reports every passion, tiff and row, every argument that took place over the hiring and firing of the great ...”

“... endlessly with customs officials and ended up paying much of the time. The young Swiss physician Thomas Platter had better luck at the end of the 16th century. His passport issued in Geneva was accepted on the Rhone boat from Lyon, but passengers without papers simply bribed the boatmen and on they went. To enter Catholic Spain, Platter persuaded the border ...”

“... On​ 10 January 1616, Sir Thomas Roe was received by Emperor Jahangir at his court in Ajmer in Northern India. Jahangir sat in an overhead gallery, with guests standing in hierarchically ranked tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on ...”

“... with the authority of the Apostle Bartholomew.’ Others thought the Buddha a decayed memory of Thomas the Apostle, who was said to have gone to India after the Resurrection. Some assumed the Buddhists were a branch of the Nestorian Christians who, exiled from Constantinople in the fifth century, had fled to Persia and later flourished in Tang Dynasty China ...”

“... library (the Bible, Prayer Book and The Pilgrim’s Progress) ‘Prime old Tusser’ – Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first published in 1557. As towns grew, so did the need for market gardens to feed their inhabitants. Willes emphasises how much the commercialisation of food, the expansion of markets and the nursery trade ...”

“... for favour – ‘broken/By wealth and poverty, torn between strength and weakness’. The more fulsome his praise and the more convoluted his metaphors, the more bitterly the speaker is protesting his condition of dependence. But the poem also mines empire’s inverse logic: its ...”

“... terror about the invasion and pillaging of her brain, ‘her treasure whose price he, not more than the nurses, could estimate’. In some way Stafford felt herself not only damaged but violated. Yet she fought against understanding her own anger, diverting it as much into meanness and booze as into art; indeed, she would have been furious at any ...”

“... of herself as much as de la Mare when she wrote admiringly that he had ‘evaded some of the more perilous reefs of literary criticism’ and had done so in part by suggesting ‘elements of religious allegory’ in his work, ‘which is as good as putting up a “No Trespassers” sign’. As well as a refuge from cant, the Middle Ages offered her a ...”

“... schmoozed Buckingham. In London there were two men – the architect Inigo Jones and the collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – who could claim to be authorities when it came to art in Italy, but on the ground there they had to deal, as did Charles, with the piratical broker Daniel Nijs. Nijs pounced on the Gonzagas of Mantua when they happened to be ...”

“... they have rightly been indignant about its victims – peasants, hand-loom weavers, slaves – and more interested in the resistance to it – from bandits, millennarians etc. Perhaps there is also a fear of being drowned in the quicksands of conventional political and constitutional history (‘How many boroughs did the Duke of Newcastle ...”

“... may not seem incomplete. Broch worked on it for almost twenty years, while completing other work. More than one version of The Spell has been published. One of them is called The Tempter. The tale is told by a country doctor in the Austrian Alps: his practice covers two villages, the Upper Village and the Lower Village, on the side of Mount Kuppron. He is a ...”

“... for his children’s welfare and proud of their achievements. Rehabilitating Branwell requires more skill. The Branwell of established legend was a weak and dissolute parasite for the sake of whose unrealistic and expensive ambitions his sisters sacrificed themselves – a hard case. The new Branwell bears a certain resemblance to the old: like him, he ...”

“... who could dictate six thousand words between lunch and tea, or Georges Simenon, who rarely spent more than a fortnight on a novel. But Dumas was not merely a novelist: he also wrote plays, travel books, memoirs, histories, accounts of great crimes plus a mass of ‘occasional’ writings which include his vast Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine. Even as a ...”

“... from Calais, travelling in coaches, receiving the amorous attentions of women who found him far more sympathetic than their husbands, and taking exercise by tying himself to the coach door with string and running beside it. In Naples he met an old shipmate turned some sort of spy, and for a while the two of them travelled together. Holman’s ...”

“... Of the eight books she has published in Italy, translation has been haphazard, UK publication even more so. Her first two books remain untranslated; The Water Statues, her third – the one with Beeklam in it – first came out in 1980. Sweet Days of Discipline came next, then a short story collection in 1998, Proleterka (2001), These Possible Lives (2009) and ...”