“... Bob Dylan’s​ first album, recorded in New York in late 1961, was simply called Bob Dylan. The creation of ‘Bob Dylan’ – the persona, the sound, the look – was as important as the record’s contents. He’d been using the alias since the summer of 1960. His given name was Robert Zimmerman and he had grown up in Hibbing, a small mining town in Minnesota; he was the son of Abe, an electrical goods supplier, and Beatty, and the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe ...”

“... On 16 March 1810​ a Mrs Martin, a ‘labourer’s wife’, was working a field near Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon when she turned up an old gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides ...”

“... In early September 1878, an old woman named Sarah Tomkins lay dying at her lodgings on Penton Place, an undistinguished terrace in the South London district of Newington. The street was poor but it clung to respectability: one might call it ‘shabby genteel’. Once it had led down to the popular Surrey Gardens, but now the gardens had closed and a rash of new housing was spreading across the area ...”

“... The winter night falls early in the small Czech town of Sobeslav, and with it comes a cold, creeping fog laced with coal-smoke that leaves a bitter coating in the mouth. The town square is deserted; the tall-spired church a hulk. There is a cramped little beer-cellar full of gaming machines, but it is decidedly not the old ‘inn’ which stood on the square in the days when Sobeslav was a staging-post between Prague and the southern stronghold of Cesky Krumlov, seat of the powerful Rozmberk family ...”

“... In the annals of French literature, Arthur Cravan is more often a colourful footnote than a sober paragraph. He is usually referred to as ‘the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan’, and this odd-seeming conjunction is often fleshed out with more disreputable terms such as ‘con man’ or ‘adventurer’. He is also described as Oscar Wilde’s nephew, which is true up to a point: he was the nephew of Wilde’s wife, Constance ...”

“... You don’t want to see him,’ said the porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’ Nicholl viewed the putative Marlowe, in his opulent slashed doublet, and wondered how he could afford the outfit ...”

“... in foreign parts, risks himself in search of a drug connection. In contrast with the Milgates, Charles Nicholl is a fully-functioning, two-tiered man of letters, whose book The Fruit Palace, † published in 1985 and reissued last year, is a triumphant piece of travel writing which is also a comic extravaganza. A further dual role is evident ...”

“... In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent virtues of failure), Charles Nicholl unearths more detail and offers more seductive speculation than any previous writer. With the vigorous Return of the Subject that besets many contemporary historians, he also can’t resist elbowing to the forefront with a Channel 4 ...”

“... English chronicle play look obsolete (goodbye Richards and Henrys, hello Lear and Cymbeline). For Charles Nicholl, however, another simultaneously personal and geopolitical factor has a bearing on the timing of King Lear: Shakespeare’s long-standing interest in France. The country whose king Cordelia marries and whose army she deploys in her attempt to ...”

“... honesty with which he recounts his experiences that he is able to admit as much. In Borderlines Charles Nicholl heads east. In his previous travel book, The Fruit Palace, he explored the ruthless cocaine underworld of Colombia: this time he is hoping to find the sources of spiritual rather than narcotic bliss by enrolling in a Buddhist forest temple in ...”

“... whose doings as a confidential agent for Sir Francis are well documented. Honan, like Riggs and Charles Nicholl in his account of Marlowe’s death, The Reckoning, assumes that Thomas Walsingham was in the same business: Honan supposes that in his time the house in Seething Lane was a kind of MI5 headquarters, full of secret servicemen controlling ...”

“... view, ‘a wonderful rhetoric of faith in the rebirth of the Sacred City of the Revolution’. Charles Nicholl repeats Delahaye’s story to the effect that Rimbaud enlisted in a Communard militia, but like most commentators, believes this is a ‘tenuous anecdote’ which doesn’t line up with the dates of Rimbaud’s visits to Paris in ...”

“... of twelve pence’.) It isn’t surprising that the most influential recent account of Marlowe, Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning (1992, revised 2002), should concentrate on what its subtitle calls ‘The Murder of Christopher Marlowe’. Despite Constance Kuriyama’s attempt to break the mould with her cautious, scholarly Christopher Marlowe: A ...”

“... modern man of late 19th-century fiction – a contemporary of Paul Montague and a predecessor of Charles Gould. The ‘delinquents, vagabonds’ and ‘mercenaries’ with whom he signs up to fight for the Dutch are another, brutal expression of this modernity: ‘true “moderns”’, Steinmetz suspects, among whom Rimbaud can pass incognito, in a world ...”