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“... the final season in the old building, proposing the traditional toast ‘to the immortal memory of William Shakespeare’. ‘When you propose a man’s health on his 359th [it was actually the 361st] birthday,’ Shaw said, ‘you may be sure that … what his health requires is country air … But Stratford wants a new theatre. The Memorial is an admirable ...”

“... has an unfailingly good eye for anecdote and a line in sarky parenthesis – on such things as William Davenant’s pox-rotted nose – worthy of a stand-up comedian. Although it will find a home in that dreariest of Dewey Decimal deserts – the public reference section – this book is fun. But it will not help the ambitious undergraduate pass his/her ...”

“... that the book held a secret but found great difficulty in not telling it. Two letters to Miss Weaver in 1921 apologise for his slowness in finishing the book. In June he wrote: ‘The nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone’s mental balance.’ This does not tell much, but would hardly fit the cheery view of Kenner that the end ...”

“... four blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible ...”

“... Bradford Road and Huddersfield Road, there are bed factories: Kozee Sleep, HSL, Sleepeezee, Dream Weaver. There are ads for beds in the papers, on the back of parking tickets, on the sides of buses. The Heavy Woollen District now has a new nickname: Sleepy Valley. Plenty of people wish it were sleepier. Two days into my trip, a man in Ravensthorpe drives his ...”

“... a former rebel and friendly pamphleteering rival of Defoe’s – described how two brothers, William and Benjamin Hewling, who had fought at Sedgemoor, fled by sea but ‘were driven back again, and with the hazard of their lives got on shore (over dangerous rocks), where they saw the country filled with soldiers, and they being unwilling to fall into ...”

“... travelled to Taipei and helped draft the league’s agenda; at the league’s 1974 conference William F. Buckley gave the keynote address. And then there was John Singlaub, a retired general and another of the league’s main organisers, who thought the US government had fumbled the urban counter-insurgency against the Black Panthers and other radical ...”

“... Roger Barfield of Queen Anne’s company, who rented one of those tenements owned by Alleyn, and William Stratford of Prince Henry’s troupe, who lived ‘at the upper end’ of the street, and was buried at St Giles in 1625. Former colleagues of Shakespeare’s such as William Sly and Nicholas Tooley are also found in ...”

“... half-hidden by the computer screens at which they all sit. It could be a stock exchange, or even William Hill’s. Bigger screens let the spectators follow the proceedings and, via a landline, do the same for the media in their own separate room where, at the touch of a button, they can get interesting passages printed out from the simultaneous transcript ...”

“... in the prose. ‘The range and grasp of his mind is always evident in the present book,’ William Empson wrote in a review of the essay collection The Dyer’s Hand, quoted by Davenport-Hines, ‘but it strikes me that his mind is increasingly hampered, and that the resulting thoughts are often wrong ... he twitters like a curate in ...”

“... Satyamurthy (‘the wise one’), henceforth known to all as Satyam, was five and his brother, William Carey, was two. Their sister, Mary Manjulabai, was born in Vizag. The parents got jobs as teachers in Christian schools and earned enough to rent a modest apartment. The landlord was a caste Hindu and so they lied, claiming they had converted to ...”

“... which he had first read as a 13-year-old in a battered, fragmentary copy lent him by a Helpston weaver. Overwhelmed by Thomson’s Whig pastoral, Clare nagged his father for some money, and bought his own copy for the bargain price of a shilling. He didn’t want to be seen reading on a working day, so he climbed over the high wall round Burghley Park. Like ...”