“... their pre-Reformation forbears to study Catholic theology, they were taught the classical Latin of William Lyly’s prescribed Short Introduction of Grammar – the language of pagans, taught with pagan texts. In order to win the Parker Scholarship to Cambridge, moreover, Marlowe would have had to have learned two arts to a much higher level than was required ...”

“... black and white farmhouses, and small manor houses like Kelmscott. The past celebrated by William Morris or C.R. Ashbee was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the great hall and the long gallery. Objects of relative indifference to a philistine public, country houses were seen by a ...”

“... in 1775. The importance of other members, such as James Boswell and the pioneering linguistician William Jones, was recognised only posthumously. Alongside Johnson himself (and before one even gets to Garrick or Reynolds), their involvement supports Leo Damrosch’s claim that the Club brought together ‘arguably the greatest British ...”

“... throwing doubt on the other prime suspect, a ‘would-be wit and self-serving layabout’ called William Hatchett – which leaves Hatchett with a single surviving claim to fame, as author of A Rehearsal of Kings … with the Unheard of Catastrophe of Macplunderkan, King of Roguomania, one of the anti-ministerial farces that provoked the Theatrical Licensing ...”

“... professors. Searching for origins, they might turn to the first page of Northern Windows,2 where William Carleton tells how ‘for some years after the Rebellion of ’98 a bitter political resentment subsisted between Protestants and Catholics ... The plays of the Siege of Londonderry and The Battle of Aughrim were acted in barns and waste houses every ...”

“... 1805 to 1807, and sent home to her family. Parts of these journals have already been published, in Thomas Sadleir’s An Irish Peer on the Continent (1920) and in Lady Londonderry and H.M. Hyde’s The Russian Journals and Letters of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (1934). For the present selection, which covers both tours, Elizabeth Mavor has gone back to the ...”

“... the poet and waterman John Taylor wrote, ‘as good for nothing but stoppe mustard pots.’ Sir William Cornwallis kept ‘pamphlets and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), as toilet paper. Books were pulled apart ...”

“... leap forward, be reversed and repeat. In ‘Christmas Every Day’, a children’s story by William Dean Howells from 1892, a father tells his daughter ‘a moral tale’ about a girl whose wish for endless Christmas Days was granted. In 1915, Einstein declared the girl’s wish theoretically possible. Time could loop. What would that be like? Until the ...”

“... proved even more difficult. That show, which she called Black Eyes and Lemonade, a quotation from Thomas Moore, is now back in a different form at the Whitechapel, as the subject of its own exhibition (until 1 September). The problem was one of definition. The organisation of Black Eyes and Lemonade was shared with the Society for Education in the Arts ...”

“... The gradings, for instance, are not always consistent: the first of three articles on the trial of William Hone is graded A but the third gets a C, and we aren’t given a reason for the difference. On another occasion Wu feels that an article is ‘beyond doubt’ written by Hazlitt, yet awards it a B. Sometimes the arguments for attribution involve a special ...”

“... Fruman in condemning Coleridge as an impotent fraud and plagiarist, many reluctantly agreed with Thomas McFarland when he declared: ‘Coleridge’s ruin, in both life and work, is ... the true human fact; the academic classic and the conventional achievement the illusion.’ It may be that in the protracted aftermath to the much insisted on death of the ...”

“... Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, reviewed in the LRB (Vol. 3, No 21) by Christopher Ricks; and Thomas McFarland’s marvellously over-the-top Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, which also appeared in 1981. (One might commend, en passant, the Princeton University Press as a place where inventive, wordy studies in Romantic ideas receive elegant ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”

“... friend who extracted exorbitant amounts of interest on his loans, and the unsavoury duo of Thomas Bridgen and William Holt Averell, who ended up acquiring, by various devious stratagems, much of the land and property that had made up his father’s estate. Cooper was no naif in such matters, but his situation was ...”

“... at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,’ Admiral William Leahy, wartime chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in his 1950 memoir. ‘The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’ Eisenhower later said it had been his belief at the time ‘that Japan was already defeated and that dropping ...”