“... briefly on 18 June, but not seconded; several of his powerful friends, including Marvell and Sir William Davenant, whom Milton had saved from execution as a Royalist conspirator under the Commonwealth, helped to rescue him. The recollection of images from Macbeth might also contain a trace of subconscious regicide guilt. Milton may have had the regicide ...”

“... o’er books on stalls with half an eye, And fly-leaf ballads on the vendor’s string, And broad-edge bold-print posters by the wall. He took such cognisance of men and things, If any beat a horse, you felt he saw; If any cursed a woman, he took note.That manages to be heroic and quotidian at the same time, describing at once a vocation in life and a ...”

“... neoclassical synthesis, shaped since the 1940s by Paul Samuelson above all. Working from a broad acceptance of Keynesian prescriptions for macroeconomic policy, the younger economists at MIT specialised in clever models that demonstrated the often dramatic implications of market imperfections such as the limited availability of information, or the ...”

“... 3 per cent actually cast their ballot for Goldsmith’s motley array of candidates on polling day. William Hague tried to make the general election of 2001 a referendum on whether Britain should join the euro (‘24 Hours to Save the Pound’) but no one cared. In 2015 Cameron, hoping to spike Ukip’s guns, included a pledge in the Tory Party manifesto to ...”

“... of illegal entries fell sharply around El Paso in the east and San Diego in the west, leaving a broad migrant channel in the intervening stretch of borderland. Many Latin Americans were ready to try it, especially after Mexico devalued the peso in 1994. At that stage crossing the wilderness wasn’t the only option for a clandestine migrant, but matters ...”

“... and, separately, from the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, whose boss, General William Westmoreland, had the Shakespearean sounding title of COMUSMACV. (In the flesh, Westy came over more as a hard-driving business executive.) On one busy day in the flourishing Saigon black market I bought an American fatigue uniform, boots, jungle hat and ...”

“... from Medieval times. Wood End, Moat farm, East End farm, Boxhedge House, Eyreswood farm, Broad Green farm, Perry Hill farm – all had moats, and some of these remained up to a few years ago. The Parish Survey records in 1722 the ‘Messuage in Cranfield built by Dr William Aspin, with the moat round it and groves ...”

“... another way was the British Art Show 1990. This five-yearly exhibition was, by convention, a broad and pluralistic survey of current British art. The 1985 version had included a bit of everything, all ages and genres, and had duly acknowledged a revival of figuration. In 1990 it was very different. The selection was not ‘representative’. No artist ...”

“... It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie violence (‘smack! her sword divorces his codshead from the codpiece’ from ‘Judith’) and a strangely, disarmingly boyish thrall to heroism. You get vivid but cartoonish tropes like the ambush under the bridge (‘Down ...”

“... entries, since these were laid down by the editorial team and represented an attempt to secure broad parity of treatment for individuals of broadly comparable ‘importance’. It is mildly paradoxical that a figure about whose life we know very little emerges by this measure as the undisputed Top British Person: ...”

“... Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle ...”

“... cautious revelations of steelier qualities. But despite the environmentally friendly metropolitan broad-mindedness Cameron transmits, and whatever he smoked behind the Eton bike sheds, what’s most arresting about the Tory leader is that he and many of his closest lieutenants are only very superficially reconstructed representatives of the old-fashioned ...”

“... some seventy feet at the Great Falls of Paterson. There’s a nice picture of it on the cover of William Carlos Williams’s book-length poem Paterson. The river makes its way through traprock and sandstone to the level plain of the city, continues north to Hawthorne, then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five ...”

“... of the two in the writer’s work gives some sense of his giant reticent power of mind. To quote William Empson, on another subject: ‘The contradictions cover such a range’ – yet they are always reciprocal, in communication with each other. The meaning of Hamlet must be intrinsic with what in it holds audiences and readers. And, even if King Lear has ...”

“... of a physical crisis (appendicitis), which came on at the launch party for a friend’s novel – William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner – were interpreted as somatic manifestations of envy. But although there were gaps in his treatment, he went on seeing Kleinschmidt for five years. Then, in 1967, he discovered that Kleinschmidt had used material ...”