“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fortress in which were imprisoned the Man in the Iron Mask (said to be the twin brother of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who wanted to keep him out of the way) and Marshal Bazaine, who had the bad luck of having to surrender Metz to the Prussians in 1870 and the good luck to have his death sentence commuted to imprisonment. Apart from this plodding example, the ...”

“... how the continuing clamour of the past acts as a help, not a hindrance, to the making of the new. Francis Bacon is quoted on one of the final walls, saying: ‘To create something … is a sort of echo from one artist to another.’ So there might be – well, there is – a graphite self-portrait by Degas next to the Lorenzo di Credi, then a Legros ...”

“... of Borges and rat poison, half-drunk Coca-Cola bottles on the table at the Astor, hairy shoulders, Francis Bacon, ‘The sun ain’t gonna shine any more’ stuck in the groove on the Blind Beggar’s jukebox. But if they were looking for a hagio-graphic fix, a corn-plaster to staunch a terminal haemorrhage, they miscalculated badly. Pearson was not a tame ...”

“... was harnessed to official ideologies under Elizabeth and James I. Terence Hawkes, Francis Barker and Peter Hulme (AS), and Paul Brown (PS), link The Tempest with the ideology of colonisation, arguing that the play’s formal involutions reflect, not transcendent truths about illusion and reality, but the ideological strains of legitimising ...”

“... that the fall of Soviet Communism had at last allowed people to disentangle Marxism from Moscow. Francis Wheen, the author of a recent biography of Marx, made a similar point. The man had finally emerged from under the political debris, and barely resembled the quasi-religious icon and prophetic travesty of the 20th century. Jacques Attali’s book is ...”

“... at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version of King Lear, Regan whispers to him: ‘The Grotto, Sir, within the lower Grove,/Has Privacy to suit a Mourner’s Thought.’ The next scene duly opens on ‘A Grotto’, where we find ‘Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, Listning to Musick’. But ...”

“... the screen Nazi he had once or twice played in his early days as an actor; he was a scaled down Francis L. Sullivan, managing nevertheless to be surprisingly successful in finding partners. Not invariably, though. Sometime in the 1970s he was in a New York bath house where the practice was for someone wanting a partner to leave the cubicle door open. This ...”

“... its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in ...”

“... when this year Pontius Pilate is not the only one washing his hands.16 April. A card from Tom King with news of the tattoo of me that he had put on his arm (pictured in the Diary published in the LRB of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation ...”

“... is, transported to Australia. Oliver’s role was exposed by the Leeds Mercury, and retold by Sir Francis Burdett in the House of Commons (Sidmouth ‘abused Oliver for a great fool for being detected’), but the operation was another successful exercise in sending shivers down the spines of the respectable classes and in justifying further acts of ...”

“... a support network for the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), headed by the philosopher Francis Jeanson. The porteurs smuggled funds and documents, and provided safe passage and sanctuary for FLN activists throughout Western Europe. Roger asked Kaminsky about his work as a forger for the Resistance. When he had finished telling his story, she ...”