“... that he should keep his crown and life? Do we conclude, with the eminent Victorian historian William Stubbs, that the pressures of 1399 wrought in Henry a ‘deep change of character’; or was he merely revealing his true self? And how did the experience colour his outlook and actions as king? Henry’s story cannot be told without addressing these ...”

“... When Thomas Jefferson left the Presidency he wrote to Dupont de Nemours: ‘Never did a prisoner released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall on shaking off the shackles of power. Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the time in which I have lived, have forced me to take a part in resisting them, and to commit myself to the boisterous ocean of political passion ...”

“... Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To Ireland, I for a neighbourly dispute he was having with one John O’Donovan. ‘He says I am his enemy,’ Irwin wrote, ‘and watch him through the thickness of the wall which divides our ...”

“... 1790s, headed by two men of humble English origins and recent American experience, Tom Paine and William Cobbett. Their innovation was to develop a tone and style which sounded more like the spoken language of the mass of the people than like the Latinate written discourse of the educated orders. Most of Smith’s chapters are studies in the use of this ...”

“... Collectors’ fantasy Christmas present it may have become, but Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies was a series of headaches before it was anything else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed in quarto before 1603, nor what arguments led to the exclusion not just of all Shakespeare’s poems and the single scene he wrote for Sir Thomas More but of three late collaborative plays, Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Cardenio ...”

“... really rather a curiosity.’ In truth, nothing quite like it had been achieved or attempted since Thomas Arne’s masque Alfred (1740), produced for the Prince of Wales and chiefly memorable for including the first performance of ‘Rule, Britannia’. Seven months later, when the music critic of the Times (unaware of Sheffield’s undertaking) suggested that ...”

“... Our ideas about metafiction are still strongly influenced by the 1960s: John Barth, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass. Thanks to the work of this group and the self-named characters of Philip Roth, we might well brace ourselves for archness or emotional coolness (rather than sincerity, warmth and optimistic ...”

“... J.M. Dent to illustrate a two-volume edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, conceived in the style of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, enabled Beardsley to give up his deadly day job as an office clerk, only to find the quest for the Holy Grail almost as constraining. The endless knights and ladies bored him; something odder and darker was emerging from the ...”

“... itself.’ The literary idea of a world oscillating between order and entropy goes back to Thomas Pynchon in the Sixties: but cyberpunk has given it a more specifically political slant. Gibson’s novels are futuristic allegories of Reaganism, projections of the contrast between the booming of America’s sunbelt suburbs and the crumbling of its inner ...”

“... here by Jill Bowers, Jack Barrack and (a practised hand, which shows) Charles Edward Eaton; from William Radice (a beautifully imagined variation on Virgil), and Mark Beeson (a similarly accomplished essay in the Dantesque); from Pauline Rainford, Monica Ditmas, Anne Stevenson (two) and John Whitworth; from Aidan Carl Mathews (another besides ...”

“... on Ubu: Jarry has left what Greil Marcus calls ‘lipstick traces’ to this day. Since 1978, Dave Thomas has kept his spirit alive with the band Père Ubu – punks owe a lot to Jarry – and William Kentridge used his creature to comment on the barbarisms of apartheid. A small but suggestive show at the Morgan Library in ...”

“... laughably called the nuclear deterrent and 11 per cent are undecided – blessed followers of St Thomas. The man in the pew is said to support the nuclear deterrent. No figures are given for this assertion. The vocabulary used in discussing nuclear weapons is peculiarly misleading, almost as though the nuclear advocates are ashamed of what they are ...”

“... in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ‘goddesses’ of ‘Proportion’ – in effect, compliance with the status quo – and ‘Conversion’, a desire to subdue and control. As Hussey points out, this passage constitutes a rare intrusion on the part of the ...”

“... in droves in the same period. A solar eclipse was about to take place. Two rival astronomers, William Whiston and Edmond Halley, had predicted where it would reach totality. As he had done once before, in 1715, Halley published in advance a map of the shadow that the eclipse would project on the earth, as seen from above – a brilliant feat of visual ...”

“... William Godwin is a man who cries out to be the subject of a life. He has everything: a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, his son-in-law Shelley and the infant grandchildren; a circle of interesting friends, many of them articulate enough to leave written records, and famous enough to have their letters preserved ...”