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“... 29 August 1871, son of John Butler Yeats and Susan Yeats, at 23 Fitzroy Road, London. His brother, William Butler Yeats, was then six years old. John Butler Yeats was a portrait painter in search of commissions. Finding few, he thought it better to have his young son brought up, for the most part, by his grandparents in Sligo. Jack spent far more time in the ...”

“... James Clerk Maxwell, a Scotsman who lived from 1831 to 1879, was a scientist of outstanding stature. Bearing his name, apart from the famous ‘demon’, is the set of fundamental equations that he discovered, governing the behaviour of electricity, magnetism and light. He also found, among many other things, the basic equation for the distribution of velocities of the molecules in a gas in equilibrium, and made other profound contributions to the statistical study of the molecules in a gas, relating to the Second Law of thermodynamics – which is what Maxwell’s ‘demon’ was all about ...”

“... genre conflates Groom’s forgery with his plagiarism. In 19th-century Ireland, authors like William Maginn, Francis Sylvester Mahony and James Clarence Mangan were in the habit of producing literary texts cunningly modelled on the work of some well-known author like Tennyson or Thomas Moore, which they then coolly ...”

“... about the painter Whistler which catches at one’s imagination. It concerns his draughtsmanship. William Rothenstein recalls Whistler talking to him contemptuously of Oscar Wilde’s house in Tite Street and doing him a little drawing of it, to illustrate the monotony of such a terrace house. ‘I noticed then,’ says Rothenstein, ‘how childishly Whistler ...”

“... Macmillan and is protected now by the enthusiasm of men such as Roy Jenkins and Robert Rhodes James. But why should those of us who are excluded from this desirable club at Westminster want such an extended work of collective biography? In the case of these volumes one obvious reason lies in the period that they cover. They begin one year after the ...”

“... criticism in five words or fewer: on her third quarto of Othello, ‘a sad one’; on her copy of James Shirley’s The Constant Maid, or Love Will Find Out the Way, ‘I doe not lik this.’ Across the start of Eastward Hoe, the very funny city comedy by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, she wrote ‘prity one’, then crossed it ...”

“... William Cecil, First Baron Burghley, served Elizabeth I for nearly forty years, as principal secretary and lord treasurer, and left an enormous body of papers. His correspondence, now dispersed in four major and a number of minor collections, dominates the political history of Elizabeth’s reign. Even more important, in some respects, are the unique series of memoranda written in his distinctive, neat and spidery hand ...”

“... at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, to begin his rebellion against his uncle, the new Catholic monarch, James II, Defoe left his young wife, Mary, whom he had married eighteen months before, to join the rebels. Novak notes that some of his former schoolmates at Morton’s Academy lost their lives in the rebellion, but he does not name them. This is a pity, because ...”

“... Robinson (whose revised Wilkie Collins, A Biography came out in 1974) and now, preeminently, to William Clarke, we now know much more – especially about Collins’s family affairs, or scandals, as they would have seemed to his contemporaries. As its title suggests, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins is sensational stuff, both in the Victorian and modern ...”

“... should say ‘witted’ criticism. Should he continue in this direction, he will soon sound like William Empson, the Keeper of the Seven Seals in this area, a great critic posing as a terrible poet, who was apparently content to commit lines such as ‘Project her no projectiles, plan nor man it.’ It is bewildering that Hill, once so richly lyrical, should ...”

“... In October 1999, he presented his rescue plan in a rousing speech in Tokyo. As Hans Greimel and William Sposato show in Collision Course, Ghosn’s story was a chronicle of triumph and downfall foretold, and the foretelling could be heard right there in the grand ballroom of the Royal Park Hotel. ‘No sacred cows, no taboos, no constraints,’ Ghosn ...”

“... flung her instantly into the Fire’), only for the poem’s author, a hard-drinking Tory called William Pittis, to be arrested and detained. A glutton for punishment, Pittis then produced The Case of the Church of England’s Memorial Fairly Stated, which landed him with a heavy fine and two spells in the public pillory, where crowd violence could be ...”

“... work. Philby achieved this by tipping the spy-catcher for the Western world, the CIA officer James Jesus Angleton, into clinical madness. Philby had help, of course. Alcohol, Angleton’s own personality, the very nature of spy-catching, the power of bureaucracies, and the appalling inefficiency of the CIA’s system of checks and controls, all ...”

“... of the countryside); it had now become hard to tell the difference between them and devils. King James in his Demonology (1597) is indignant at the idea of devils who live in the storm-clouds: probably he felt that this practically lets you get back to believing in the pagan demigods. The familiar of Faust in the original German has never been to Hell at ...”

“... a type of celebrity now.’ He contrasts Ledger, who died three years ago at the age of 28, with James Dean, who died 55 years ago at the age of 24 and became the standard against which all young, handsome, would-be acting geniuses in Hollywood are measured. It’s not only, Thomson says, that Ledger wasn’t the actor Dean was. It’s that movies, and their ...”