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“... combines politics with reflections on the place of education in public life. In one play the King of Navarre is whimsically transformed into a bachelor and rechristened Ferdinand; he retreats from court not for fear of Spanish-funded Catholic plots but to lead a quartet of abstemious students. He experiences a crisis of conscience at breaking an ...”

“... iv) in a review by Kingsley, Ricks notices the witty conflation of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the King Charles spaniel in I ix – but others are of real significance. Ricks doesn’t cite Tennyson’s revealing comment that the narrator’s belief in the innate patriotism of the commercial classes (‘For I trust if an enemy’s fleet came yonder round by ...”

“... is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from ...”

“... living novelist versus Britain’s greatest ever novelist as if it were a literary Godzilla meets King Kong. Ackroyd understands Dickens better than pettifogging academics because Ackroyd, like his subject, is a creative genius, and such minds are privileged to think alike. Ackroyd himself makes this claim, if rather more tactfully than his ...”

“... some text apparently very remote from the central interest and move in from that periphery on to King Lear, or whatever the ‘literary’ work in question happens to be. That there can be a genuinely fresh look at texts for the most part already well-known to historians, including literary historians, may be seen from Steven Mullaney’s book about the ...”

“... an anatomy of human feeling. The role of the female novelist is thus in a sense supplementary: Elizabeth Gaskell admits that she knows little of economics, but one function of the Victorian novel is to nurture the lived experience, interpersonal values and affective pieties which those economics are in danger of brusquely dispelling. The Dickens of Hard ...”

“... traders reached Russia, bringing, among other things, armaments, and wary messages from Queen Elizabeth and her government, with vague promises of political asylum for the paranoid tyrant and suggestions of brides (Elizabeth herself, de Madariaga believes, was never a possible consort for the tsar). Though he never ...”

“... it about right. It was pretty motley to be a sort of Jacobite (‘It was a’ for our rightfu’ king’), and also a sort of Jacobin (‘a perjured Blockhead and an unprincipled Prostitute’ was his comment on the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette). Again, mourning Scotland’s loss of independence and praising the British constitution are none ...”

“... which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear ...”

“... by an English electorate. Even for Gladstone’s Liberal colleagues (though not for him), and for Elizabeth I or Lloyd George, they were a costly and debilitating diversion from more important matters. But except in the late 18th century, Ireland denied its administrators, even full-time, well-meaning ones, the illusion that overrule would be acceptable if ...”

“... 1846, Hayter’s account weaves together the lives of the famous, the obscure and the forgotten. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning plan their elopement. Samuel Rogers entertains the Gräfin Hahn-Hahn, a romantic novelist who has come to meet her English public and disappoints them by turning out to have false teeth and a glass eye. The painter Benjamin ...”

“... Richard II as the first move towards the performance of Phaethon – not just because of what the King says about Phaethon (‘Down, down’ I come, like glist ‘ring Phaethon ...’), but also because a school-play is the nearest we now get to the duality of the masque, even though the school-play is usually lopped of political topicality. (Yet Richard II ...”

“... it goes with the note to ‘The Dream of the Lion’, one of ‘Two Poems for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’, in which the Laureate mentions ‘my boyhood fanatic patriotism’. So everything is as it should be. What a happy coincidence, in its way, that a poet as good as Hughes should believe, and deeply and passionately, all the things ...”

“... its beginning from the female sex’. We must hope that the likes of Baroness Thatcher, Elizabeth Windsor, the Emperor Akihito and James Callaghan were informed of this when they were inducted into the order. Unfortunately for those of you keen to check the reference, the book has no notes, only a further reading list which has no mention of Signore ...”

“... your heart and mind have been excited. I must leave that to you,’ Heger told them, as he told Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte’s first biographer, after Charlotte’s death. Heger encouraged the Brontës’ writing, but demanded that they pay attention to their craft. ‘Poet or not … study form,’ he once admonished Charlotte. He often returned their ...”