“... it was we were reading in the wake of Sartre and Camus, and before the Sixties became the Sixties. William Golding, Iris Murdoch, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Pynchon, who else? Oë wrote his graduation thesis on Sartre (in 1959), and evokes Camus in Hiroshima Notes: ‘A plague that ravages a city in North ...”

“... but Edward’s reputation darkened during the Enlightenment, and the great Victorian historian William Stubbs condemned him as unsurpassed in vice and cruelty. More recent writing has brought Edward a partial rehabilitation, noting the administrative innovation and shrewd political management that characterised the later years of his reign. For ...”

“... In a chapter on animals in his Description of England, the Elizabethan antiquary William Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne ...”

“... no one on the New York arts scene fails to put in an appearance in Tippins’s book, starting with William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, up through Thomas Wolfe, and on to anyone you care to name, sliding to an elegant halt with Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland. Largely it’s the names, not the work. You almost get ...”

“... That same summer George IV died, leaving the throne to his marginally more stable brother William. The death of the king brought a general election, and the Tories were replaced by the Whigs. The chief difference between the two parties was that the Whigs were more sensitive to the growing wrath of the unrepresented upper middle classes. They favoured ...”

“... Faust to the passing moment, “Remain thou, thou art so beautiful.”’ Mary and Percy’s son William had died in Rome, aged three, in June 1819. The fragment ‘My lost William, thou in whom’ is only seventeen and a half lines; sometimes even Shelley was lost for words. It ends:        Let me think that ...”

“... two ornaments and some textura fonts from John Herford. And a small number of sheets printed by Thomas Berthelet and Thomas Godfray around 1536 feature what Blayney calls ‘disoriented 4s’ – ‘whoever struck the matrix from which the 4 was cast did so with the punch rotated ninety degrees anticlockwise from its ...”

“... absurdly expensive and diametrically opposed to the wishes of the parents in this city’. William Bulger, the flamboyant state senator whose district was the bastion of the anti-busing movement, lamented the ‘unremitting, calculated, unconscionable portrayal’ of his mostly Irish-American constituents ‘as unreconstructed racists’. Defending ...”

“... but he was also very good at turning childish inadequacy to imaginative account. A year after William’s death in 1910, he set out to edit a selection of William’s letters only to end up producing a remarkable self-portrait. Though he had intended to preface the letters with a short history of their ...”

“... is the family’s great collection of paintings, including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry ...”

“... adoring and talented sisters, and innumerable sympathetic friends, including Maria Edgeworth and William Wordsworth. His scientific star never publicly waned: just before his death, in 1865, he was being honoured as one of the world’s greatest scientists. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica he merits a longer column than either of those two other Sir ...”

“... nightmare: Englishness lost, identity cancelled, fatal infection,’ David Seabrook writes of Thomas De Quincey. Of himself, the dole-queue De Quincey, making a high-velocity, long-term progress through the Isle of Thanet. More speed, less haste: Seabrook is a master of the throwaway put-down, a speculator in tachist topography. The short haul, down the ...”

“... he can be glimpsed in the glare of what was going on around him.’ In 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Shapiro observed the paradox that while Shakespeare ‘more so, perhaps, than any writer before or since … held the keys that opened the hearts and minds of others’, he ‘kept a lock on what he revealed about himself’. It is as if the ...”

“... in late August or early September 1617, came the eccentric English author, polyglot and traveller Thomas Coryate. He was a smallish, bearded man with a long, rather lugubrious face – ‘the shape of his head’, according to one description, was ‘like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before’. He wore simple native clothes, and was thin to the ...”

“... Thomas Carlyle was quite fond of the Chartists – until they opened their mouths. In an essay on Chartism published in 1839, the Sage of Chelsea harangued the political establishment and spoke up for the stoic dignity of the English working man: ‘Chartism with its pikes, Swing with his tinder box,’ he wrote, ‘speak a most loud though inarticulate language ...”