“... who produced masterpieces of late 16th-century Catholic piety were drunkards: the publisher Christopher Plantin told a Spanish client that the brothers only worked long enough to accumulate sufficient funds to vanish into Antwerp’s taverns, from where Plantin, who depended on their remarkable talents, would extract them, pay their bills and retrieve ...”

“... may be dubious, it cannot be denied that it yields some interesting insights. Terence Hawkes, Christopher Norris and Jacqueline Rose show how the attempts of some influential Shakespeare critics to reduce the plays to coherent unified structures break down as the gaps and contradictions of the texts are carried over by an uncanny transfer to their own ...”

“... avant-garde art world Fraser was one of the more worthwhile dealers of his time. According to that king of the métier Leo Castelli, he was ‘a superb dealer’; among leading artists, Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg ...”

“... the issue of genre with questions of biography. Given the fates that overtook his colleagues Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd in 1593 and 1594 – the one stabbed to death at 29, the other eventually dying after an extensive and painful interrogation – you could argue that Shakespeare might have felt that he had been living on borrowed time since the ...”

“... of Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras or relations between the later Roman Empire and the Persian king Shapur II, which Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and others debated in the new Florentine library of San Marco. Yet they were also – or were supposed to be – places of quiet, intensive study. When the French jurist and antiquarian Claude ...”

“... had made the island their home (the French Ministry of Culture’s website still claims that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered the island’); the suppression and expulsion of the island’s Indigenous population in the 17th century; the transfer of enslaved people from Africa to work on sugar cane and coffee plantations; the abolition of slavery in ...”

“... much is said but because too little. There is nothing on the story in Herodotus of the Egyptian King who sought to discover the true, primal language by bringing up children in isolation and noting their first utterances, nothing on Chaucer’s mysterious (and non-existent?) authority, Lollius, nothing on the greatest example in English of unsubdued ...”

“... performed in the presence of the Ambassador, Sir Horace Rumbold. ‘Cyril was always the pimp, Christopher Sykes the carpet-seller and I was the slave-girl,’ recalled another visitor. An amorous Nicolson wrote afterwards to the author that ‘I was jealous of your being young and free and so bloody clever ... you fiddle with what I really believe is ...”

“... are being brought to bear on Dylan by people who (like Day’s co-editor of the Tennyson MSS, Christopher Ricks) have discovered that what Dylan has to say and his exceptional way of saying it are as responsive to their critical attention as the traditional topics of Eng Lit. The panellists were worried that the ‘romantic outlaw’ tendency would object ...”

“... than the evening air/Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars’), I was reminded of Christopher Ricks saying twenty years ago, in an article about the sexual revolution of the Sixties, that he was against the whole thing on the grounds that the new free-for-all was unfair to plain women. (What about plain men? Are women pleased to get any old ...”

“... table, McCullers tinkering manically with The Member of the Wedding. One day he breezed into Christopher Isherwood’s Santa Monica home, and Isherwood was entranced. ‘Tennessee is the most relaxed creature imaginable: he works till he’s tired, eats when he feels like it, sleeps when he can’t stay awake.’ Isherwood went on to describe the park at ...”

“... the BBC had created (Ted Ray, Billy Cotton and his band, the gramophone record-presenter Christopher Stone), and not only set them off to better advantage but did so in pre-recorded, packaged series that were much more profitable for the performer. In an early demonstration of the dread art of scheduling, the commercial stations also concentrated ...”

“... it makes on the listener. It is literary criticism ‘to the moment’. Like his PhD supervisor, Christopher Ricks, Griffiths is above all an apostle of close reading. He treats the passages he discusses as morally and psychologically instructive as well as semantically subtle. He attends to small details of syntax or diction, but he is also concerned with ...”

“... I called, ‘couple with me, as thou didst with Cadmus, Rhoecus, Tithonus, Endymion, and that king Numa Pompilius to whom thou didst give secrets. As Lilith comes without a sign, so come thou. As the sons of God come to copulate with women, so now let a daughter of Shekhina the Emanation reveal herself to me. Nymph, come now, come now.’ Like a lot of ...”

“... volumes of the Encyclopédie (1751-65) of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert; or Christopher Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta, eight folio volumes of parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic, with Latin translations, printed in Antwerp between 1568 and 1573; or John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-38) with its 435 ...”