“... Ireland was a logocentric culture, in which print proved something of an enigma. The Irish-born Sterne was intrigued by the way in which uniform, anonymous black marks on a page could incarnate the living word. He was aware of the way the linear nature of both print and narrative flatten out the simultaneity of experience. Joyce himself was struck by ...”

“... simple experiment in a field outside Daventry that aircraft could be detected by radio. Radar was born. Remarkably, it was only two years after this that Lindemann demonstrated to Churchill that tinfoil strips cut to a certain length and jettisoned from a height would simulate aircraft on the enemy’s radar screen and baffle anti-aircraft ...”

“... capitalised Ward in the ominously capitalised Hospital. She’s on familiar turf: she was born there and it’s where she delivered her three sons with fairy-tale dispatch. It was also the site of many unpleasant physical examinations: her bowels, her ovarian cyst. Nine years before the novel begins, she gave birth to a fourth child at the Hospital, a ...”

“... February 1615 aboard the East India Company’s new ship the Lion, and returned, in command of the Anne Royal, to the Downs in September 1619. He had previously held a household position under Elizabeth I; travelled from La Coruña to Valladolid as part of the delegation sent by James VI and I to ratify an Anglo-Spanish alliance in 1605; commanded an ...”

“... journey, before her prize of being proposed to by the clever, funny, entertaining, well-born and even well-off Henry Tilney, in himself the strongest contrast to Brandon and Ferrars. And yet it is a mark of his moral integrity that he proposes to Catherine (we are told clearly) out of kindness and gratitude, and remorse at his father’s ...”

“... to set the record straight about ‘the diva myth that has followed me all my life’.She was born Barbara Joan Streisand in 1942 in Brooklyn. Her mother, Diana Rosen, was a gifted singer; Streisand never shook the feeling that her mother was jealous of her. When she was fifteen months old her father, Emanuel, died of a seizure at a summer camp in the ...”

“... unideological, patronage-based one-party government. He agrees that between the death of Queen Anne and the accession of George III, the Tories had no share in government, and were systematically discriminated against in the distribution of local patronage. But where his opponents think 1688 was decisive, he does not; where they think the propertied ...”

“... desire’ for Woodville, as Penn notes, and ‘used to getting what he wanted’. Penn opts for an Anne Boleyn theory of events – in Woodville, Edward ‘met his match’. If he wanted to sleep with her, ‘he needed to marry her first’. Marrying a commoner was a huge gamble for a usurper, however, and is the reason the ceremony was held in secret: the ...”

“... her first sketches in Harper’s and Putnam’s. One of eight children, seven of them female, born to Charles Jarvis Woolson and Hannah Cooper Pomeroy Woolson (James Fenimore Cooper was her uncle) in the 1830s and 1840s, Constance arrived at adolescence with only a single sister, Clara, and a brother, Charles Jarvis Jr. Though Charly seems to have been ...”

“... book, and after being discharged he dictated the first version of this one to his assistant, Anne-Sylvie Malbrancke.The basic facts of the matter are straightforward, and everyone understands them well. You are not supposed to have sex or procreate with certain immediate family members. Typically the list includes your parents, your children and your ...”

“... that peaked in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen ...”

“... information we have concerns leases, wills, marriage lines, property. His pillow-talk with Anne Hathaway, Emilia Lanier or Mr W. H., interesting as it may have been, was not recorded. If you want to discuss Shakespeare, you have to depend on reading and seeing his work. Not so with Brecht. Not only did he write a great deal of commentary himself. All ...”

“... was dead and that he had killed her, he was immediately rushed to the mental hospital of Saint-Anne in order that he should escape being arrested and interrogated by the police. Such allegations are only to be expected when an eminent Communist is involved: newspapers are always eager to show that there is no sense of equality or justice among ...”

“... number!’ A list so nakedly daft obviates detailed scrutiny. It may be worth asking how Lever (born 1806) contrived to predate Jane Austen. If Spender wants to double her number, extensive independent research can be spared her. Five minutes in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature will give her roughly one hundred and twenty additional male ...”

“... to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest another, less respectable side to him. Just a few ...”