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“... level, there is rivalry among two of Freddie’s pupils to fill the part of Prince Arthur in King John. One boy is crude but magnetic and destined for stardom; the other is finer-grained, a true Thespian. Their opposition is less interesting than Fitzgerald’s sharply accurate evocation of an old-style West End production of Shakespeare, footlights and ...”

“... 18th-century critic Maurice Morgann suggested in his ‘Essay on the Dramatic Career of Sir John Falstaff’, Shakespeare’s art is to make us infer far more material about the nature and potential of his characters than is needed for the action of the play. Cordelia is not pinned to her filial devotion and her demise at the hands of Edmund’s ...”

“... Edward III in Stratford. It’s a rainbow copy of The Shakespeare Apocrypha, scribbled over by John Barton when he was at King’s, with blacklead for Shakespeare, green for Greene and, jokily, orange for Peele. This is the good thing about ‘Shall I die?’, that it drives you back to the ‘margins’ of the oeuvre. And what a play you find ...”

“... but in his instinct for the paramount importance of such things in the life of a university. As John Sparrow and others have pointed out, and as Dr Green exhibits, Patti son was the champion of a university not as a training ground – ‘a school for young men who have outgrown school’, as he put it – but a place where learning really mattered, and one ...”

“... He usually picked on a big beast – big, that is, in the little world of Oxbridge English. John Carey, for instance, is lampooned for his ‘naivety’ in taking Shakespeare’s plays as ‘a good sample of how vivacious the English language was in the playwright’s day’. (This is really just an excuse for Griffiths to perform an imagined dialogue ...”

“... this wasn’t the message the Reagan administration wanted to hear and he was quickly replaced by John Negroponte, a conservative hardliner. Negroponte began to consolidate Honduras as a client state of the US and the base from which the Contra war against Nicaragua was directed. When he became ambassador, US military assistance to Honduras was four million ...”

“... The last two years, in which capitalism has suffered one of its periodic shocks, have given John Maynard Keynes a new lease of life. Events have demonstrated the limits of the theory that economies can be relied on to be stable if they are lightly regulated and otherwise left to themselves. There is now much talk of the paradox of thrift, whereby the rational choices of individuals can prove collectively ruinous, and of the need for government to counteract the inherently anarchic tendencies of markets ...”

“... Victorian decade began in 1856, when the Tipperary Bank collapsed and the chairman’s brother, John Sadleir, a serial swindler up to his neck in debt, made the headlines with that suicide by poison on Hampstead Heath (thereby achieving immortality as Merdle in Little Dorrit). A sequence of failures followed: the Royal British Bank, the Western Bank of ...”

“... used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story collection Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959, won the National Book Award, a notable achievement for a tyro in his ...”

“... the heroine (born in 1844 and now 17) has been brought up. The inmates are described, among them John Vroom, ‘a thin, dark, knifish boy about fourteen’ whose doxy is (implausibly) ‘stitching dog-skins onto stolen dogs, to make them seem handsomer breeds than what they really were’, as Vroom himself does ‘a deal with a dog-thief. This man had a ...”

“... Chronic Symbiosis These things can be arranged, he said. Besides, glitter has become reasonable again. Hadn’t you heard? For one irrational second I thought today’s subject was plagiarism, as symbolised by that desk. But no, it’s joy in never knowing, in having once known, and in its still not being too late to know. Yes, but I know now that I knew long ago when children around me grew ...”

“... Promenade My mind occupied by something, I notice shoals of dry leaves rattled by the wind, upsurging like a dog that’s starting to lie down, and a voice like that of my mother says, ‘Then you’ll just have to learn to do without it. The leaves are shells.’ Another time the voice brings me back from not too far away. I was imagining sisters, how a door holds sway over one’s long life, only coming at the end to a ‘foolish consistency’, by which time one has passed all the reasonable objections, is on one’s own ...”

“... Small boys​ of all ages and both genders look forward to World Cups. Perhaps nobody, though, looks forward to it more than actual small boys. I’ve been looking forward to them ever since my first, in 1970 – the best, I still think. The thing I remember almost as well as the drama and excitement of the football was my incredulous horror at the thought that I would be 12 before this thing came round again ...”

“... It is not true that the exchange of goods at the end of the Cold War was entirely one-sided. Granted, the Soviet bloc got gangster capitalism, rampant inequality and freeish elections; but we got some things too. Prominent among them has been the utterly choreographed, wholly undemocratic party congress. These were once a derided feature of Communist states ...”

“... of Fiction (1921). Having studied this ultra-Jamesian tract, the bright young Gerald Mills and John Boon determined that ‘viewpoint’ was the main ingredient in narrative and that their romances ‘should always be written from the heroine’s point of view, in order to promote identification and increase interest and suspense’. The ...”