“... by expanding the sports coverage, introducing women’s pages and focusing on high-profile trials. James Canham Read was hanged for the murder of Florence Dennis, having slept with both her and her sister. His last words, according to the Evening News, were ‘Will it hurt?’ This was perhaps a question to which the answer was ‘Yes’. In retrospect, all ...”

“... and a lack of courage (plus an exercise in grievance politics) on the part of the SNP and its then lord advocate, James Wolffe. Wolffe refused to issue a statement confirming that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people who injected at an SDCF. Frustrated by the situation, an activist called Peter Krykant ...”

“... a ‘makar’. A century later in his how-to-be-a-king book, the Basilikon Doron, the versifying James VI of Scotland claimed that he had ‘not spared to play the bairde against all the estaitis of my kingdome’. When James boarded the English throne in 1603, his Scots had to be translated for English readers to whom the ...”

“... Gallery, painted around 1620 when he was just out of his teens, with the Metropolitan Museum’s James Stuart, Fourth Duke of Lennox, painted in 1633. The former is a small picture: you look at it close. Threads of white paint highlight the old man’s hair, beard, watering eye and damp lip. Paint and flesh exchange substance. The same is true of a picture ...”

“... books like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Jesmyn Ward’s anthology The Fire This Time, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and the poet Claudia Rankine’s award-winning Citizen. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, on receiving the MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant, Rankine acknowledged as much: ‘To ...”

“... like’; ‘the objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that Our Lord God didn’t want it in His Book.’ The raft in question is the Iberian peninsula, which has seceded geologically, split off from Europe down the middle of the Pyrenees (a ‘tectonic enigma’ is what the narrator owlishly calls it), and is sailing out ...”

“... in whose work ordinariness achieves a highly individual and idiosyncratic literary status – James Joyce and Italo Svevo. Growing older, a bit despondent, never feeling quite well – these are the symptoms of Svevan man which we all recognise, and from which we suffer ourselves. The Svevan ordinary man belongs to no recognisable social category. Neither ...”

“... What is important, as Claudius leaves the court, is that the king, like some character in Henry James, now knows that Hamlet knows, and is armed. Perhaps more in need of notice are one or two elements that interfuse with dramaturgy, in the extraordinary brilliance of the work’s verbal style. The first occurs late in the play’s second scene. Earlier in ...”

“... of people who worked outside – and against – official Government policy. Chief among them was James Guerin, a Bible-thumping chorister-entrepreneur from Connecticut, who made a fortune by flouting his Government’s policy on arm sales – especially to South Africa and Iraq. When he was short of money in 1987, Guerin came to Britain and tricked one of ...”

“... to France and Italy which Katherine, then 29, made with her Irish neighbours and contemporaries, Lord and Lady Mount Cashell. Setting off in November 1801, they, like many other Britons, were taking advantage of the peace brought by the Treaty of Amiens to see for themselves the country of which they had heard and read such lurid accounts. Off they ...”

“... Christianity, that they are inseparably ‘part of the law itself’. That was the judgment of a Lord Chief Justice in 1676, since when blasphemy has been an offence in common law; the sanction may be asleep but it is not dead. If tempted to believe that it is, one needs to recall the 1976 prosecution of Gay News and the subsequent failure in the House of ...”

“... mistress of the patron of Shakespeare’s theatrical company, Queen Elizabeth’s cousin and Lord Chamberlain, Lord Hunsdon, so there may also be something in Rowse’s sexual free-for-all: one moral regime perhaps discarded, another not yet established, something like what Burckhardt claimed for Renaissance ...”

“... meant a tax, a kind of death duty, but the idea behind it was that once upon a time a lord issued ‘war gear’ (here-geatu) to his retainers, and claimed it back on their death or retirement. So some of the weapons a commander salvaged from his own side might go to the king or lord, who might equally have a ...”

“... Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

“... undispersed private collection in England dating from before the Civil War. Only the library of Lord Lumley (some 2800 books variously located in the British Library) is larger. Burton’s library was assembled from 1594 to his death in 1640. It was a working library, where expensive folios are rare. In his earlier, less affluent years, many were purchased ...”