“... oblique warning to Sir Walter Raleigh, or to find in Doctor Faustus an occasional glimpse of Simon Forman or John Dee or Henry Percy (the ‘Wizard Earl’ of Northumberland). Given the ‘desire to speak with the dead’ to which Greenblatt hubristically admitted at the start of his follow-up to Renaissance ...”

“... and far worse than London, were the new industrial ones. Analysing fertility and mortality rates, Simon Szreter and Anne Hardy judge that in places such as these the 1830s and 1840s were probably the ‘worst ever decades for life expectancy since the Black Death’; and they repaint the ever pathetic picture of ‘relentless youthfulness’, of a ...”

“... from procuring slaves for New Spain to Arctic whaling. (In a similar way, the Darien Company and John Law’s Mississippi Company had seduced the Scottish and French states into backing failed colonies.) The ‘Bubble Act’ of 1720 neither prevented the bursting of the South Sea Company’s bubble when its overvalued shares collapsed in price nor stopped ...”

“... might fantasise about what it was like, but to go further was dangerous. In 1318, a man called John, perhaps the son of an Exeter tanner, appeared at Oxford’s north gate claiming that he was the rightful king of England. John said that he was Edward I’s true first-born son, swapped out in the cradle by a negligent ...”

“... Mark Griffiths: his elaborately illustrated essay, ‘Face to Face with Shakespeare’, focused on John Gerard’s well-known Elizabethan manual of botany, The Herball or, General Historie of Plantes, and purported to demonstrate that one of the four seemingly allegoric figures on its ornamental title-page – a figure clad in a Roman costume and crowned with ...”

“... John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable, wise and often right, the more so in tending to contradict The Intellectuals and the Masses, which had none of these qualities ...”

“... and called and texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did ...”

“... had dabbled in professional music and drama, taking leading roles in a Harlem production of Simon the Cyrenian and a play about voodoo called Taboo, and singing bass with the Four Harmony Kings in the Broadway musical, Shuffle along. In 1922 he had gone to England to appear in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s production of Voodoo. There is something diagnostic ...”

“... simple identification of the praiser of Shakespeare, upon whose words the whole dedication turns: John Webster, in the note ‘To the Reader’ before The White Devil. Browning’s Elizabethanised play has its affinities with Webster: moreover, it was canny of him to emend Webster’s prefatory words so as to reduce them to a single-minded praise of ...”

“... to get rid of Wilson, but it was interrupted by a message to call at Number 10 immediately. The simon-pure doctor abandoned his knife, fork and napkin (not to mention Mr MacLennan) and made his way up Whitehall, where the man he was plotting to bring down proceeded to offer him the post of Minister for the Navy. He accepted. Dr Owen records that this was ...”

“... babies came from were told that they popped out from their mother’s armpit. In the 18th century, John Hill wrote that ‘whenever we read of Virgins got with Child by Rivers, by Dragons, by golden Showers, &c’ we ought to be sceptical. It was really ‘Wind, nothing in the World but Wind’. There was the prosaic business of making a baby – everyone knew ...”

“... the result a ‘semi-forgery’, and by skilful detective work he has spotted the probable forger: John Toland, an Irishman born in 1670 who was apparently the illegitimate son of a Roman Catholic priest. The real Ludlow was a fierce Calvinist who believed that his escape from England had been due to the Lord having ‘hid [him] in the hollow of His ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... period. Among the characters who reappear in Dixon’s book is the sadistic slave-master Simon Legree, who opportunistically turns Republican, gets elected governor of North Carolina, steals a fortune and relocates to New York City. The Leopard’s Spots sold more than a million copies; Dixon’s subsequent Civil War-Reconstruction novel The ...”

“... generation after his death. His contemporaries Goethe and Darwin admired him; so would Thoreau and John Muir. Many places and things in the natural world now bear his name: a current in the Pacific Ocean, towns in Kansas, Nebraska and Saskatchewan, a county in California, a university in Berlin, not to mention a penguin, a bat, a cactus, an orchid, a mushroom ...”