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“... of early biographical hearsay about the playwright which survive, Shapiro is most attracted to John Aubrey’s report that Shakespeare ‘was not a company keeper’ but habitually excused himself from wild nights out on the grounds of ill-health. Shapiro’s hero, though assiduous at keeping up with the news, would rather stay at home at his writing desk ...”

“... He was irritated in July 1830 by another revolution in France, which yet again disposed of the king. Worse, there was unrest in Britain. Hay-ricks were set on fire, and threatening messages from ‘Captain Swing’ sent to the owners of the land they were on. The duke and his ministers saw to it that culprits, guilty or not, were hanged or transported to ...”

“... Show, Married with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the ...”

“... title, but in another two years the old devil will be 70 and perhaps he is beginning to mellow. John McDermott remarks in his appealing study of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given ...”

“... the far-flung allusion – for instance, to the statue of Memnon at Thebes, to Michelangelo and to King Lear. It will give more work to the scholars who have already erected a monument to Beckett. He belongs with the generation of writers, like Joyce and Eliot, whose work requires such attention. What is not so obscure in Ill seen ill said is the presence of ...”

“... any way memorable, even a chapter that’s memorable. I’ve always liked ‘Henderson the Rain King’ for one. Oh no. Dull, dull ... I think he’s a dull man and a dull writer. Hello, Saul, how are you? Do you feel that way about Philip Roth? Oh, only more so. Philip Roth’s quite funny in a living-room but ... forget it. Bernard ...”

“... she finds Mrs Taylor taking photographs of snails copulating, and Alan Taylor – who since John Betjeman’s death has styled himself ‘the nation’s Parkinsonist’ – lying on the floor recovering from delirium. The diarist comments: ‘Cynthia just did not know what to say: snail sexuality in the garden, delirious dreams – and from outside, the ...”

“... consistently and precisely the opposite of what their names say they are: Mr Wise is a dunce, Mr King is a Whig, Mr Coffin’s uncommonly sprightly, And huge Mr Little broke down in a gig While driving fat Mrs Golightly.The lines come to life when they begin to see names less as clues to the characters of their owners – whether faithfully reflected, or ...”

“... president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious campaign as an independent, which broke new ground by rallying the white working class against intellectuals and anti-war hippies. Though always less popular than Johnson, Humphrey won the ...”

“... In one of John Berryman’s more lucid dream songs (No. 364), there is amusing reference to the reading habits of Henry, the song sequence’s screwed up protagonist: O Henry in his youth read many things he gutted the Columbia – the Cambridge libraries – Widener – Princeton – the British Museum – the Library of Congress but mostly he bought books to have as his own cunningly, like extra wings ...”

“... extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this ...”

“... opposition, an elegant William Pitt rides the shoulders of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton ...”

“... to reconcile herself to his view that Glover was his only conceivable successor. One candidate, John Rickman, Jones ruled out because he lacked sufficient force to be an effective administrator. Quoting a letter from Jones to Klein, dated 6 April 1941, in which Jones terms Glover ‘the only medical analyst who can appear before a non-analytic audience ...”

“... where he encountered modern art in the form of pictures by Gauguin, Wilson Steer, Augustus John, William Nicholson, and woodcuts by Kandinsky, collected by the University’s Vice-Chancellor. Frank Rutter, curator of Leeds Art Gallery, completed the boy’s artistic education. He had already begun to write poems, in free verse influenced by ...”

“... was closer to the sentiments of those who had opposed Charles I in 1641-43 than to those of the King and his supporters. But that did nothing for Cromwell’s reputation; there was still no place for him. He was anathema to Royalists as a republican regicide, and to radical Whigs as a quasi-Royalist. Roundhead sympathisers admired what he had done in the ...”