“... in the 1490s. Mortimer makes one new point: he suggests that Kent got his information from Sir John Pecche, who was in a position to know since he was, according to Mortimer, castellan of Corfe, where Edward II was in confinement. If Pecche was indeed at Corfe between 1327 and 1329, he was certainly well placed to spread stories of Edward’s ...”

“... Lucia spent the last thirty years of her life in the psychiatric hospital in Northampton in which John Clare had been detained a century before. She died in 1982. If her father was unusual among the great Modernist writers for the resolute ordinariness of his art, he was also exceptional for his anti-tragic vision. There is no real tragedy in Joyce’s ...”

“... and Bs remain a cut above the monthly supply from the Red Cross.’ Reviewing Flaubert’s Parrot, John Updike complained that ‘some of the metaphors are foppishly spun out.’ He had a point: in Barnes’s novels, almost every striking detail is sooner or later recapitulated as a simile or metaphor. Flaubert’s Parrot tells an amusing anecdote about ...”

“... Nero in a very different mode from the Antichrist. The sixth-century historian-cum-fantasist John Malalas gives him the honour of executing Pontius Pilate: ‘Why did he hand the Lord Christ over to the Jews,’ his Nero asks, ‘for he was an innocent man and worked miracles?’ How, Champlin asks, can we account for these discordant versions? Why was ...”

“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us that the ...”

“... commentary on the Colombian president’s epigram in 1948, he does believe, like the journalist in John Ford’s film The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, that when the legend becomes the truth, one should print the legend. García Márquez is giving us lots of (already shaped) history, and subjecting that history to acts of shaping that are most ...”

“... sources and give them life within her fiction is quite exceptional. The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe relates in sketchy detail, with much acknowledgment that his sources are imperfect, the burning of the Lollard Joan Boughton at Smithfield in 1494. ‘The night following that she was burnt,’ Foxe says, ‘the most part of her ashes were had away of ...”

“... philosopher. All the children are very musical, like their mother, and all of them are, as John Cage said of Schoenberg, self-made aristocrats. Waugh sometimes gives the impression that had it not been for all the suicides, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the two world wars and the rise of Fascism in Germany, the Wittgensteins would have ...”

“... since Dryden.’ There is a report in a recently discovered manuscript by the poet and playwright John Hoadly of Fielding arriving at rehearsals incongruously decked out ‘in a compleat Suit of Black Velvet’ – the outfit for which Dryden was still remembered, and which the Dryden surrogate in Buckingham’s satire The Rehearsal traditionally wore. Like ...”

“... description of former slaves ‘unexpectedly standing’ at the helm of a ship after an uprising; John Berry’s strange and lurid film Tamango, starring Dorothy Dandridge; and the Senegalese novelist Boris Boubacar Diop’s playful metafiction Le Temps de Tamango. Mérimée ‘does not simply ignore abolitionism; he actively negates it’, Miller ...”

“... with them. Some of his stances reflect our parlous era, but others have clear parallels in John Donne, who also imagined how the world would end, as well as in Virgilian homoerotic pastoral, also written in rough times. Chronic, after all, means ‘persistent over time’, and if human self-endangerment has persisted (enough that it now threatens much ...”

“... is a reference to Thackeray poking fun at the preciousness of Bulwer-Lytton: ‘By the bye, Sir John what wemarkable good clawet this is; is it Lawose or Laff – ? . . . this clawet is weally nectaweous.’ And of Greek wines – which Saintsbury found ‘as a rule, insufferably beastly’ – you might want to retrieve the Latin description of the ...”

“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”

“... get what you pay for. Each concept has acquired constitutional legitimacy in its time – for, as John Griffith famously observed, the constitution is what happens. So when you pick up The New British Constitution and ask what new constitution that might be, one answer is that the British constitution, because it is always changing, is always new. But the ...”

“... of a scruple that finds its red line somewhere between marriage and the marriage bed. (Yes, John Ruskin, but this, we’re given to understand, was Vollman’s second wife.) What’s really odd is Vollman’s need to explain a 19th-century wedding in terms meant to flatter a 21st-century sensibility. When Vollman says: ‘I know what you are ...”