“... had been at least part of the inspiration for a book by one of the editors of this volume, John Elliott: his Richelieu and Olivares (1984). For all that this volume is produced with the lavishness we have come to expect from Yale University Press, with no less than 74 illustrations, most of them portraits of 37 ‘favourites’ and of the monarchs they ...”

“... willing to read as ‘anal’) sink into the slime, the film goes down the drain. Vera Miles and John Gavin, pale shadows of Leigh and Perkins, stand around fretfully or rush about enthusiastically like a budget version of the Famous Five, saying and being nothing very interesting; awkward puppets, whose job it is to edge the audience to more anxiety before ...”

“... with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a raindrop. His ...”

“... albeit with some cyborg features, rather than taking forward what Mirowski reads as the vision of John von Neumann (mathematician, polymath, weaponeer, Cold War hawk, pioneer computer scientist, game theorist) of a fully cyborg economics, one which ‘appreciated the significance of the computer as an information processor for a reconceptualisation of the ...”

“... and led to the arrest of Mark Thatcher in South Africa and the jailing of the British mercenary Simon Mann in Zimbabwe. Shaxson toys with the idea that the US (and possibly Spain and Britain) encouraged the attempted coup. The US would have had good reason to welcome a change of regime. Obiang’s son, Teodoro Nguema, owns an airline, a large timber ...”

“... of children and naifs). In the end Debord views St Cobra as a forerunner, an artistic St John to the political SI, a pivot to launch Situationism, which should be presented, he writes early on to Jorn, as ‘the necessary transcendence of that era’. However, Situationism as such does not emerge very distinctly in these letters, largely because, in ...”

“... be disappointed. Born in 1882, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was the first surviving child of John and May Joyce, whose recent marriage had been fiercely opposed by both sets of parents. Their first baby, named after his father, had died at barely two months. The first healthy son was crucial affirmation for the marriage and, although 13 further births ...”

“... conditions – conditions which have now disappeared. We have had the woe-is-England vapourings of Simon Heffer and the rushed observations of Andrew Marr. An academic industry has flourished. Now both Weight and Robert Colls have written requiems for the old Britishness which are also ruminations on a new, more democratic England. Britannia, for so long a ...”

“... friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private ...”

“... there is no likelier a subject of a missing play or plays. We happen to know, from the diary of Simon Forman, that a play acted by that company in 1611 was called, or at least was about, ‘Richard II’. From Forman’s description the play was plainly not Shakespeare’s – or the play performed on 7 February 1601. Do the descriptions of the February ...”

“... poets such as Jeffrey Wainwright and Paul Muldoon; there has also recently been the odd case of John Fuller’s The Illusionists, a novel in the stanza of Eugene Onegin which expertly takes on much of the wit, melancholy and technical fluency of Pushkin’s poem. ‘Out for the Elements’ is also in the Pushkin stanza, but differs from Fuller’s poem in ...”

“... buy a newspaper, began to back down and to deal with Ingrams for a settlement. Ingrams describes Simon Jenkins, then editor of the Evening Standard, bringing Goldsmith’s final peace terms to him in a coffee bar, when it looked as if Goldsmith might buy the ailing Standard. At that point, Ingrams, too, was ready to settle: The strain of an apparently ...”

“... Saxon, are momentarily collapsed, in what Heaney, borrowing a phrase from his poetic compatriot John Montague, describes as an escape from the ‘partitioned intellect’ into some larger-spirited, unsectarian country of the mind.It seems a pity to sour this eirenic liberal pluralism. But the ‘partitioned intellect’ in Ireland is not in fact one which ...”

“... It is a bit brown and the scribal hand is functional, unremarkable, almost ugly. For Simon Armitage the scribe’s letter forms are ‘like crusading chess pieces’, which is a disservice to chessmen. Sometime after it was written, it was illustrated by an artist endowed with exuberance rather than skill. The figures which appear in the spaces ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”