“... waved his cloth in the sky, sword ready for the kill.’ Readers of Trout Fishing in America know Richard Brautigan as a writer who doesn’t tell a story, or parody anyone telling a story, but is simply a way of being and seeing, interested in other people who are like that too, such as a man staring at meat about whom the only point is that ‘there simply ...”

“... of Commentary, was closely involved from the early Fifties until the early Seventies: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer. It was in the early years of this same period, the first five years of the Sixties, that what was often called the Family, a closely allied group of mostly New York ...”

“... was highly regarded as a joker. In Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, he appears as ‘Allen Chalmers’, the brilliantly mischievous co-inventor of Mortmere, ‘a sort of anarchist paradise in which all accepted moral and social values are turned upside down’. Isherwood and Upward went to the same school, Repton, then to Cambridge, and in both ...”

“... a good one and a bad. New to me and truly funny, for instance, is ‘The Skinhead Hamlet’ by Richard Curtis. I am grateful, and yet this gift-horse must be looked in the mouth since it is a stalking-horse. It isn’t a parody at all but a spoof and a burlesque. Brett’s dullard identifying of two main types of parody (of style and of form!) isn’t even ...”

“... Michael Roberts’s New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain and uneasy, but durable for all ...”

“... In 1949 when a panel of his fellow poets (including T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, W.H. Auden and Allen Tate) awarded Ezra Pound the Bollingen Prize for The Pisan Cantos there was an immediate and angry public debate. The reaction is not surprising and might have been worse had the texts of Pound’s wartime broadcasts over Rome Radio been publicly available ...”

“... paradises have been ruined. Berwald describes the disappointment of the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen on discovering there was nowhere left to dive in the Maldives – coral bleaching had occurred on every reef. He sought out ‘coral experts’ to address the problem and pledged up to $4 million a year to fund a high-resolution satellite map of coral. This ...”

“... the King’s Enemies; killing the Chancellor, Treasurer, or Judges in Execution of their Duty’. Allen Boyer (an American attorney and historian) and Mark Nicholls (a Cambridge academic) have what at first appears a straightforward project: to trace the path followed by English law for more than a millennium in categorising, criminalising and penalising ...”

“... While such authority was granted to a number of English clerics, including Father William Allen, who in 1568 founded the seminary in Douai for the training of English missionary priests, and the Jesuit Robert Parsons, the position taken by the Catholic and Protestant authorities alike was that men faced damnation in dissembling their ...”

“... part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary political pertinence of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and even The Merry Wives ...”

“... be considered a letdown. The new biography by Catherine Mayer, Charles: The Heart of a King (W.H. Allen, £20), begins by reminding people of an earlier claim, made by Jeremy Paxman, that Charles regularly instructs his cook to boil seven eggs each morning in the hope of getting a soft one. But then quickly quotes a former private secretary who says this ...”

“... Stained glass allowed her to make images that looked like collage, a form then very much in vogue: Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi had shown at the Whitechapel in 1956, incorporating pictures of movie stars, images of food packaging, snippets of consumer advertising. Boty made collages without support or encouragement from a tutor: one from 1959 shows a ...”

“... Sichel doubted he had any Soviet assets at all. Even so, after taking over as director of the CIA, Allen Dulles concluded that ‘he’s on our side and that’s all that matters. Besides, one needn’t ask him to one’s club.’ The CIA shielded Gehlen and his collaborators from prosecution and gave them refuge in the United States even though Gehlen ...”

“... a Mistress Greffine or Griffin, and among its frequent guests was a Stratford businessman called Richard Quiney. From here, on 25 October 1598, Quiney wrote a short letter addressed on the verso ‘To my Loveinge good ffrend & contreymann Mr Wm Shackespere’ – the only item of Shakespeare’s correspondence to survive. It is a request for a loan of ...”

“... not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the Guardian has Jeremy Bullmore, a sage and doleful-looking ‘agony uncle’, fielding people’s problems ...”