“... in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master subordinate, male ...”

“... unassisted genius’; others saw her poetic inventions as nothing more than a talent for mimicry. Francis Williams, a Black Jamaican slave owner, praised her verse in assimilationist terms: ‘Thy body’s white, tho’ clad in sable vest.’ A reader sneered in 1788 that ‘an ourang outang has composed an ode.’ This is why, for Gates, Wheatley was not ...”

“... Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.All children, except one, grow up.All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will ...”

“... of ‘mania’ in 1788. At the ensuing Parliamentary inquiry into his treatment, it emerged that Francis Willis, the divine-cum-physician who had treated him, had allowed the King to shave himself with a cut-throat razor. As Frederick Reynolds related the story a quarter of a century later, Edmund Burke immediately ...”

“... proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be ...”

“... joke) with a medallion of the Queen hanging round his neck and positioned over his heart. Philip Francis told Burke the account was ‘pure foppery’. Jefferson said the real-life queen bore little resemblance to ‘the rhapsodies of Burke’. They might or might not have agreed with recent commentators who see Marie Antoinette’s nakedness, like that of ...”

“... enters his outhouse to perform the act of defecation that will see him hailed as ‘Moses, Moses, King of the Jews’ who ‘wiped his arse in the Daily News’. Buck Mulligan, in his parody of Mass, quick-changes from priest to military doctor, peeping at an imaginary stool sample floating in what he has been presenting as an altar bowl. The shaving bowl ...”

“... conversing on the subject of ‘murder will out’, and one of them tells a story about a woman of King’s Lynn who confessed to having killed her husband when she saw a play about a similar crime:Sitting to behold a tragedy …Acted by players travelling that way,Wherein a woman that had murtherd hersWas ever haunted with her husband’s ghost …She was so ...”

“... when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’.On 27 September 1822, Jean-François Champollion wrote his Lettre à M. Dacier, presenting to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres his system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set ...”

“... drove big trucks and longed to wander the West at terrifying speed on a motorcycle, and a third (Francis) was ‘a musing, discontented, lonely young reader of books … filled with a strange pleasure and the belief that he is the only mortal in the town who has frighteningly understood the meaning of life and death’. When Kerouac’s friend the poet Allen ...”

“... am will be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”

“... high or middle-grade erotic printmakers, builders of grottos, providers of poesie to the king of Spain. These various sites and types of image-making amount to a circuitry, in Bull’s opinion, not a set of high-and-low sealed chambers. ‘Somewhere along the route from porn to poesie,’ he says in a not uncharacteristic sentence, ‘the loves of ...”

“... a phase of ‘improving’ the imperfect Shakespeare, as for example in Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which allowed Cordelia not only to survive but to marry Edgar – a much more ‘satisfying’ result. And the 19th century produced one of my favourite ‘prequels’, Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which offered the ...”

“... about the Stone was precisely its absence: the fact that it had been carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even ...”

“... duty-free privilege, but the English intervened. An official letter warned the Hamburg Senate that King William would regard any agreements with the Company of Scotland as an ‘affront’. Paterson and his delegation returned almost empty-handed. Meanwhile, the directors had managed to slow the cash haemorrhage just before the company went broke. The first ...”