“... Haskell was obviously suspect, since he had a Russian mother and a Russian wife and had been to King’s College, Cambridge, so the press surrounded his house, making it impossible for him to go out. I was staying there at the time and had to push my way past them to obtain basic provisions. They also repeatedly telephoned in the early hours of the ...”

“... died, and a fifth is missing. At the start, her daughter has received what may well be the missing Michael’s clothes, washed up from the sea ‘in the far north’ at Donegal. During the course of the play, Maurya tries to persuade her remaining son, Bartley, not to ride off with the horses to the Galway fair, predicting that he, too, will be taken by the ...”

“... than those for a Manson programme, but consoles himself: ‘Yeah, it’s pretty hard to beat the king.’ A group of interviewees for the TV show, identified in the screenplay simply as ‘three long-haired guys’, provides the following exchange:    ‘Mickey and Mallory’s the best thing to happen to mass murder since ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... here of Titian’s friend and public-relations manager, Pietro Aretino, and his greatest patron, King Philip of Spain, are rich in revealing detail and seem, by contrast, fully rounded. No reliable record survives of the way Titian conducted himself in the company of friends, let alone in private. The Ferrarese ambassador in 1522 claims that the artist is ...”

“... millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy conurbation, unfathomable, inchoate, yet liveable and boundlessly energetic. London confers prosperity on the rest of Britain rather than drains it away, they say. It is ...”

“... there is no greater ambition than to live and die in Santa Monica. ‘If I ever get the choice,’ Michael Moorcock declares, ‘that’s where I would cheerfully end my days.’ This is simply the most recent turn in what has proved to be one of the greatest tragic-comic intercontinental love stories of all time. Not too long ago lucred Yankee cognoscenti ...”

“... him).Brando was right, judging by the 2004 movie version of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Michael Radford. The film itself is a pedestrian and pretty adaptation that can’t quite decide where it stands on the antisemitism of the main characters, but Pacino is an excellent Shylock, emphasising the character’s furious dignity in the face of ...”

“... to honour as the play proceeded. As Dodsworth writes of the fight at the end, ‘an almost-King, an almost-reconciliation and an almost-duel naturally conspire together to produce “accidental judgments, casual slaughters”.’ The trouble is, as with some 19th-century reactions to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, reading Hamlet Closely Observed ...”

“... a moral purpose (and cheerfully confesses to a preference for Nahum Tate’s happy ending to King Lear), Malone, however superior as a textual scholar, is scarcely a Shakespearean critic at all. He is content to use authentic historical documents to illuminate Shakespeare, and vice versa, but practically silent on the value or use of both. His criticism ...”

“... du Barry, similarly, Negri twice has a man blindfolded; she dresses in men’s clothes and has the king acting as a lady’s maid. In Die Bergkatze, when she wants to gain the hero’s attention, she chucks a snowball at him. She’s always running, darting around the possibly parodic Expressionist-style sets, racing up and down the staircases. Matching her ...”

“... Admiral Horthy to Szalasi in Hungary and Marshal Antonescu to the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania. Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian pro-Nazi whose name became a synonym for collaborationism, was excluded from power for most of the first 22 months of German occupation. Hitler sensibly preferred to rule through influential local notables rather ...”

“... I wrote for the Guardian that night described him as the Labour Party’s would-be philosopher king. What I did not register was that Benn’s lecture that night marked the public beginning of a long intellectual journey. It eventually transformed him from a fairly orthodox left-of-centre Labourite to the front man for a form of radical socialism which few ...”

“... a ditch as having fallen off a log. In either case the suicide’s property will be saved from the King. We can, Murray says, sometimes catch suicide ‘in the act of running away’. The juicier stories come from France, like that of Philippe Testard, a mad merchant who kept giving his money away and once, at the elevation of the Host in the Mass, lifted up ...”

“... of papers sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s ...”