“... in keeping with the neoclassical taste of the time, interspersed with a heavily adapted version of King Lear and Mrs Siddons’s much admired Lady Macbeth. On the new larger stages, selection was made on the basis of scenic opportunities. Henry VIII enjoyed a vogue, as did Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III, famous for ...”

“... has his lieutenants stand by his bedside every morning waiting for orders, as if he were the Sun King. During the wars, he funded all sides and sold arms in all directions, so that – unlike most other Lebanese politicians – he was never seen as a militia leader. As a branding campaign, it obviously worked: Hariri was forced out of office between 1998 and ...”

“... subject: ‘“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too!”’ We notice that Holt has begun to turn his deep question in an unexpected direction. ‘Why is there something rather than nothing, because there is, and we’d better ...”

“... to Macbeth, Caesar to Brutus. Greenblatt adds to these the ghosts who appear in dreams, notably in Richard III; but I think this is a red herring, as is his introduction of the nightmares of German Jews at the coming to power of Hitler – a rare case, here, of the presentism which has been a worry in Greenblatt’s other works. So to Hamlet, and ‘Remember ...”

“... served in a number of ministerial roles before losing his seat in 2019; and the attorney general, Richard Hermer KC, a barrister appointed from full-time practice at Matrix Chambers.The published list of ministerial appointments included an asterisk against the outsiders’ names with a footnote recording that the ...”

“... to be British.I’m glad we got that sorted out. Meanwhile, the heart refuses to break at news of Richard Branson’s fortune shrinking by 42.6 per cent to £2.4 billion. Alex Chesterman – once of Planet Hollywood, now of planet Earth – has seen the value of his online car retailer, Cazoo, sink by 99 per cent. It turns out that the prime minister, Rishi ...”

“... metre and little deaths of rhyme. Hecht stands with the strongest formal poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur and James Merrill, who accepted Auden’s legacy and for the most part worked ravishingly within the boundaries it set. There were free-verse poems over the years, but not many, and they were rarely among his best. Hecht’s most personal work is ...”

“... England’s varied landscapes – sometimes neutralised as picturesque garden features, as at Richard Tracey’s Cotswold mansion, which cannibalised parts of the former Hailes Abbey; sometimes gaunt safety hazards like Crowland Abbey church, where the tottering nave roof-vaults (twin to those in Westminster Abbey) loomed over the parish church and across ...”

“... freedom of the imagination entitles us to say just anything. When someone said he wished he were King of China, Leibniz replied that that man’s wish was, first, to be dead, and second, that there be a king in China. Either what is imaginable goes a lot further than what’s conceivable, and so can carry no weight of ...”

“... of ‘aliens’ in various guises, including those appearing in monster-breeding films such as King Kong. As Warner makes clear in her opening lecture, myths are very versatile, though it is a piece of social engineering to pretend that a myth-story is always the same, and the same from time immemorial, because it is true. Actually, myths renew and ...”

“... war-bands affixed the Gothic label to the kingdoms they founded. By 500, Theodoric titled himself King of the Goths: that is, the eastern Goths (Ostrogoths) in Italy – Spain was in the hands of kings of the western Goths (Visigoths). The peoples these kings ruled were quite disparate, Gothic identity being something chosen and assumed rather than ...”

“... in 1678 and became the first Englishman to make the journey to Mecca and return, long before Richard Burton’s celebrated voyage in 1853. Pitts converted to Islam, as so many in his situation did, and although he remained a slave until 1693, when he managed to escape, he seems to have been treated well and to have formed a largely favourable view of his ...”

“... principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship was detained in Southern Italy by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, then at war with France. For two years he was left to rot in Brindisi castle. In a neighbouring cell, the geologist Dolomieu, another prisoner of war, applied himself, using soot, a stick and the margins of Bibles, to the composition of ...”

“... was once on a ship overtaken by pirates, has a far better claim than Shakespeare to have written King Lear and Hamlet). Greer doesn’t need to insist that Ann ‘must have been the original for the shepherd’s wife in The Winter’s Tale’ or wonder whether Shakespeare was remembering ‘his own callow wooing’ of her in Love’s Labour’s Lost, because ...”

“... he sent William Holland to Newgate for issuing the pamphlets of Tom Paine, but not for publishing Richard Newton’s scandalous political caricatures. Newton, a brilliant cartoonist who died at the age of 21, is the subject of an exhibition and catalogue from the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester. When Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity ...”