“... emotionally as well as intellectually. Who would not sympathise with the long-serving priest Christopher Trychay, trying amid the upheavals of four reigns to hang on to his parishioners, his income, his integrity and his vestments? The people of Morebath do not seem to have been eager for reform, or change of any kind. In Duffy’s view, the reign of ...”

“... jazz club stands). Within a few days Wolfgang and Nannerl had been granted an audience with King George III and Queen Charlotte, but their trip was very nearly derailed when Leopold contracted a throat infection that left him bedbound for weeks. With all concerts cancelled for the duration, Wolfgang was able to concentrate on composition for the first ...”

“... process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies. On the opening day, the conference director, Christopher DeMuth, responded that he had ‘communed’ with the ghost of the Iron Lady, who had let him know that she was ‘on board’ with the circus of flag, family and nation. When the proceedings began, the agenda was dominated by wokeness. Woke schools ...”

“... at Haileybury College, a training school for the East India Company. He became a member of the King of Clubs, a dining society for Whig luminaries, and was friendly with the editors of the Edinburgh Review. His fame grew with the publication of a vastly expanded second edition in 1803, which substantiated the basic principle of population with references ...”

“... ways a book for its time. Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edward’s least favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of ...”

“... that would be essential to dramatic invention. By contrast with university-educated rivals like Christopher Marlowe and John Marston, or the erudite autodidact Ben Jonson, Shakespeare owed most of his classical knowledge to his education in a provincial grammar school; but, in spite of Jonson’s condescending reference to his ‘small Latin and less ...”

“... fabrication that the saint, almost certainly Greek, was actually the daughter of the British king Coel. The book features the sort of young woman you might find in Angela Brazil, given to saying such things as ‘What a lark! What a sell!’ Converted as an old lady to the new religion, she conceives the duty of her piety to be the discovery and ...”

“... quoted.’ Not in 1832, they don’t: both these stanzas were added in 1842, and were probably, as Christopher Ricks suggests, ‘precipitated by the death of Hallam’. The oddest features of Tucker’s method of ‘specifically literary biography’ is that it is confined to Part One of the book. He sees Tennyson’s career divided into a phase of ...”

“... the college discovered no trace of Archer (or the course he said he attended) in their records. Christopher Wilson, in unpublished research for the Daily Express, could find only three O levels, taken over two years, attached to Archer’s name in the fine print of the Wellington Weekly News. But these are petty questions compared to Archer’s American ...”

“... personal identification which disavow personality. Take, for instance, a poem from the collection King Log (1968), subtitled ‘A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam’, and entitled ‘Tristia: 1891-1938’. It is quoted in full: Difficult friend, I would have preferred You to them. The dead keep their sealed lives And again I am too late. Too late The ...”

“... or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with the deer forests about which his rich schoolfellows used to ...”

“... scholars – C.K. Stead, Ronald Bush, Julius himself – believe that the review was by Eliot. Christopher Ricks doesn’t disagree with this judgment – whether or not Eliot wrote the review, he observes in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, it has ‘the stamp of his approval and the stamp of his tone’. Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks ...”

“... that it was in part written by the up-and-coming Shakespeare. Other writers proposed include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd and, most recently, Thomas Watson. According to a contemporary account of his death in 1593, Marlowe himself was knifed while playing backgammon. I have sometimes wondered if this detail, not found in the coroner’s report, was an ...”

“... Bend in the River); and monstrous post-colonial abuse had followed. He didn’t actually say that King Leopold, bad though he was, was probably not much worse than Mobutu, or Idi Amin, or Mugabe, but he allowed one to think it. And when he sought to expose what he called ‘the great lie’ about colonialism by emphasising the miscegenation and transgressive ...”

“... several examples of slaves who named their children after Dunmore, offered praise to the distant king or identified themselves as Britons whenever their free status was challenged. But the actions of the British during the Revolution did not demonstrate a consistent or durable commitment to black freedom. Lord Dunmore and his successors refused to free the ...”