“... Essex village, he grew up to be a convinced Puritan, profoundly unsympathetic to the church of Charles I and William Laud. Gaskill exaggerates when he says that in the 1630s ‘Puritans were jailed or put to death,’ but the regime was sufficiently hostile that Pynchon, like thousands of other Puritans, despaired of the prospects for the godly in ...”

“... Newman’s on the extreme right, makes only fleeting appearances, and his sisters and brother Charles appear even less. As for Newman’s parents, it would be interesting to know if there is any clue, in what is known of their lives and opinions, to the extraordinary nature of their son. Yet Newman is such an intellectual giant, so fascinating, that it is ...”

“... predictable. In the first paragraph of the General Introduction Deane compares this anthology with Charles Read’s Cabinet of Irish Literature (1879): it would be interesting to learn why Field Day rejected writers such as Monk, Ryves, Tighe, Leadbetter, Hall, Mulholland, and over a dozen other women who appear in Read. I particularly missed some of the ...”

“... was read as ‘a bitter cry from a world without tenderness and without gaiety’, or, as Frederic Harrison put it, ‘a story of rank cruelty and almost insanity’. Virginia Woolf agreed, speaking of the ‘almost insane religious mania of the father’. This, without question, was a book about the grim oppression of a life-denying father and the admirable ...”

“... for Mediterranean exile, or with Janet Browne’s recent first volume of a large-scale life of Charles Darwin. Holmes asks what we might now think of Coleridge had he died shipwrecked off Sicily. The audit is positive: what came next, according to Holmes, only damaged his startling early achievements. Even more tantalising questions might be asked of a ...”

“... formation of the Whig Party. Several Whig leaders emerged from the movement, including President Harrison, who ran in 1840 as the nominee of both the Whig and Anti-Masonic Parties. Anti-Masonry’s focus on conspiratorial threats to republican virtue and its appeal to the evangelical culture of moral reform also shaped the identity of Whiggery, particularly ...”

“... but the only man alive ever to have seen it is the attendant (who unhappily turned out not to be Harrison Ford), and he wasn’t telling. The Falasha Jews were once a strong force in Ethiopian politics as well as culture, but most of the few remaining Falashas were airlifted to Israel during the Soviet military dictatorship. On our way back to Addis Ababa we ...”

“... in The Practice of the Wild, a documentary film featuring her human companion and the writer Jim Harrison, recently shot at San Simeon, on Hearst property; a leisurely senior citizen conversation on wilderness, Native American myths, the Beat Generation, mortality and memory. ‘Nature is not a place to visit,’ the man says, ‘it is home.’ He is Gary ...”

“... in one of Netflix’s numberless true crime productions (viz, a reconstructed FBI interview with Charles Manson, peddling his ‘blame it on the Beatles’ spiel); a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles-at-home photo from 1963; a ‘previously unseen’ Beatles photo at Shea Stadium from 1965; a hip young mixadelic band citing ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ as ...”

“... such as those he implanted in the Duo Concertant for violin and piano (he linked them to a book by Charles-Albert Cingria about Petrarch) – and his attraction to right-wing regimes that could make him feel physically secure. He flirted, almost literally, with Mussolini (he gave him an inscribed copy of Chroniques and a gold medal depicting Napoleon and Marie ...”

“... suggests that the lady’s knowledge of unpleasantness was’ something or other. Frederic Harrison found ‘the lady in question’ something else. ‘Perhaps the lady was one person with intimates and another person at other times.’ By the time he has got Jane Austen buried, with a memorial tablet that fails to mention the fact that ‘the lady ...”

“... David Glass, who years later succeeded Walton as chairman of the company, travelled down to Harrison, Arkansas, to see the opening of one of the new shops: It was the worst retail store I had ever seen. Sam had brought a couple of trucks of watermelons in and stacked them on the sidewalk. He had a donkey ride out in the parking lot. It was about 115 ...”

“... Craig Raine recalls that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin’s poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature ...”

“... already performs works by key experimental composers such as Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer and Lou Harrison. In addition to the usual orchestral percussion instruments, Cage tells Thomson, ‘we can improvise instruments from junkyards or construct things, given specifications.’ Stravinsky and Bartók’s orchestral music had already given percussion players ...”

“... Museum. He founded the Royal Academy and supported it through its shaky early years. He supported Harrison and his famous chronometer and paid for Herschel to build the largest telescope in the world behind his house at Slough, as well as for Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti (where they observed the Transit of Venus, while the king was observing the same ...”