“... in fear of being forcibly circumcised. In pride of place is the portrait of Coryate engraved by William Hole; around its cartouche lounge a trio of bosomy courtesans, one of whom is shown vomiting over his head. Another illustration by Hole, inserted in the text, shows Coryate bowing in greeting to a famous Venetian courtesan, Margarita Emiliana. The ...”

“... and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and ...”

“... perfect for private conversation … organised around a gargantuan walk-in safe containing a Shakespeare First Folio and a first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost’. Just think of those spooks whispering about pinkos over their cups of tea an arm’s length from an expensive old book about Satan.Matthiessen’s father was an architect and a naval ...”

“... blood clots were Christopher Marlowe, violent, restless, brilliant, while the cancer would be Shakespeare, coming in many guises, dependable, sly, fully memorable. In painting, the blood clots would be Jackson Pollock, the cancer Barnett Newman. In Tory politics, Boris Johnson would be a blood clot; William Whitelaw, if ...”

“... and visual concretion but an almost abstract delight in language. This last combination is rare: Shakespeare and Keats have it. Take, for example, a phrase from his celebrated story, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911): a miner lies dead in a living-room, stretched out in ‘the naive dignity of death’. Or a moment in Lawrence’s travel book about ...”

“... indiscipline of democracy, admired the harmony of hierarchy; one of his favourite passages from Shakespeare was Troilus’ ‘speech on degree’: ‘Take but degree away, untune that string, and hark! What discord follows!’ He hated mass culture and often ranted about American moral decadence. The only place he felt at home in the United States was on ...”

“... not her real forename; ‘Crafts’ may be a tribute to Ellen Crafts, who with her husband, William, made a daring escape from slavery in 1848 disguised as a white male. Whoever ‘Hannah’ was, she lives now in the pages of her book, and we need to look within the text to find out who and what she was: and since it has many autobiographical ...”

“... reassuring than not being bothered. We should not be ‘scamping our work’, as Housman accused Shakespeare of doing too often. Short-cuts are no good in the long run if one cares about ‘the truth of things’.Housman’s poetry, by the same token, is always more impressed by what actually happened than by what might have been (‘An excellent topic for a ...”

“... James was eleven, Stirling Castle was raided by Catholic rebels. At sixteen, he was kidnapped by William Ruthven, earl of Gowrie, and imprisoned for ten months. This plot, known as the Ruthven Raid, sought to remove James from the influence of his first favourite, his French and Catholic cousin, Esmé Stuart. After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, James addressed ...”

“... at what Wordsworth called ‘getting and spending’. His phrasing sometimes sounds rather like William Blake, whose name and example as a London poet crops up quite a lot, or like Coleridge at his most indignant: this is a story of native genius held in thrall by the hostile forces of trade – what Hill refers to at one point, in a Poundian spirit, as the ...”

“... take note: tough-guy-hipster-fedora-favourers – Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, J. Edgar Hoover, William S. Burroughs, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Depp – might all be considered unwitting imitators of Sarah Bernhardt.) 5. The Rampant (er … ) Erotomania. (One moment, Herr Doktor – cough cough – my throat is tickling me.) World famous by her late ...”

“... and Eliza Emmerson. In March he made his first visit to London, where his portrait was painted by William Hilton. Taylor and his business partner James Hessey gave a dinner for him, at which Clare met and became friends with Henry Cary, whose translation of Dante he draws on in ‘To the Snipe’. A week after returning to Helpston, he married Patty ...”

“... Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special attitude’ to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building . . . These were not really my creations; they did not contain my history; I might search in vain for ever for any reflection of myself. I was an ...”

“... rhetoric. He often stunned teachers and contemporaries by his ability to recite huge tracts of Shakespeare, Lincoln, Kipling and the like. Emotionally he focused on his Quaker mother, Hannah, whom he regarded all his life as a saint. ‘He never let us forget his mother had to scrub bedpans,’ a White House staffer recorded nearly fifty years ...”