“... in 1552 into a family of minor Norfolk gentry. He prospered as a barrister under the patronage of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, became an MP and by 1593 had been elected speaker of the House of Commons. Within two years he had become Elizabeth’s solicitor general and then her attorney general, a post in which he achieved celebrity as a foul-tempered ...”

“... Barring Vogel, the core members all got screen deals. They hesitated to invite the novelist William Gaddis because none of them could get through his mammoth novels. They relented, Friedman tells us in his memoir, Lucky Bruce, when Heller’s one-time agent, Candida Donadio, said not to worry – nobody read Gaddis’s novels. In the city, when they ...”

“... moon – the view of Earth from a spacecraft window is another famous Apollo photograph, taken by William Anders two missions before Armstrong’s. ‘It’s unreal,’ Collins said. And then: I’ve lost a Hasselblad. Has anybody seen a Hasselblad floating by? It couldn’t have gone very far – big son of a gun like that … Well, that pisses me ...”

“... Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley House; Vienna, where Auden bore out his own prophecy: ‘I shall probably die ...”

“... picture of a Spain bristling with violence on the verge of becoming a world power. The historian William Atkinson could be called prescient for writing, early this century, that the accession of a woman is ‘an event commonly fraught with untoward consequences’. He was, however, talking about the ‘salvation’ of Castile in the 1470s, not Britain in ...”

“... aristocrats in stately halls. His last public appearance is in January 1928 as a pall-bearer at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey along with the Prime Minister, Kipling, Shaw, Housman, Barrie, Galsworthy, and the Masters of the Queen’s College, Oxford and Magdalene College, Cambridge – all of whom (with the exception of the dons) I recall as ...”

“... our being here. So the universe has ‘woken up’, but in a local, accidental and low-key sense. Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos rejects this view and tries to build another. His subtitle is ‘Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False’. It is false, Nagel says, because it cannot deal with a cluster of real ...”

“... his juicy prospectus – seems a pity. Instead, we must make do, at least for the time being, with Thomas Underwood’s immensely detailed and tirelessly literary investigation of Tate’s early career, which culminated with Tate, at almost forty, on the brink of an eventful if largely uncreative middle age: a middle age in which the poet maybe tried to ...”

“... symbols are too ‘handy’.) America has a prestigious tradition of such cultural semiologists. William Carlos Williams’s sifting of the American grain (‘to discover the NEW WORLD ... what it has done to us, its quality, its weight, its prophets, its – horrible temper’), H.L. Mencken’s jocular scrutiny of the American language, Edmund Wilson’s ...”

“... In the 1840s a Thomas Carlyle could mimic the German pedantic style and laugh at Herr Teufelsdröckh of Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo (a scatalogical invention worthy of Jonathan Swift), but opposites are known to attract. As the century moved on, Wisenschaft, a portmanteau word connoting the highest possible academic culture, took hold of the British academic imagination ...”

“... that ‘possibly’ is). In 1838, the Preston United Independent Harmonic Brass Band wrote to Mr Thomas Clifton of Lytham Hall in Lancashire: Sir, by the desire of a Fue Respectable Friends of yours in Preston has caused hus to write to you with a Petition as a Solitisation for a job of Playing at your Dinnering Day as they told hus is taking place on ...”

“... of Psalm 20, is the oldest surviving version of any psalm. Among the more recent exhibits was Thomas More’s psalter, printed in Paris in 1522, with prayers written in the margins in Latin and English while he was in the Tower of London awaiting execution. The Book of Psalms provided an impetus for the discussion of theological and philosophical ...”

“... comes to vivid life as a pasticheur. ‘The truest Plagiarism is the truest Poetry,’ claims Thomas Chatterton, warming to Ackroyd’s theme, and perhaps overdoing it, along with Ackroyd’s Wilde, who had been able to believe that ‘almost all the methods and conventions of art and life found their highest expression in parody.’ Still, such claims do ...”

“... robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were so exotic that they seemed to raise ...”

“... Walsingham, Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and preserved in the public imagination by Thomas Lant’s pictorial roll, was the grandest accorded to an English subject before Nelson: a determined show of strength by the forward Protestant party to which Sidney had belonged and in whose cause he became a martyr. Poets wrote elegies which answered to ...”