“... bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an evocative drift through the peppery air of the evening marketplace, past the stalls selling stock cubes and mosquito coils, and the smells of fried yam and charcoal fires, towards the coloured lights of Patience’s ...”

“... the spirit of the new music in the same way that the voice of Mahalia Jackson identified Gospel. John Smith’s discography of Johnny Cash, who was resident in Memphis at the time and also benefited from Phillips’s expertise, contributes to the idea of a movement. Presley’s intelligence, however, has always been in doubt. Joe Esposito, his infamous ...”

“... anything his aesthetic and literary origins in the Nineties. Of his various versions of ‘Old King Cole’, the Browning parody is perhaps the funniest: Who smoke-snorts toasts o’ My Lady Nicotine, Kicks stuffing out of Pussyfoot, bids his trio Stick up their Stradivarii (that’s the plural). But the Swinburne is the most loving – it ...”

“... is, as I write, ranked 271 in Amazon’s UK sales list (41 in the US), while the Arden edition of King Lear is ranked 13,791 (309,493 in the US). People are a lot more likely to buy books about Shakespeare’s life than they are to buy books by Shakespeare. The money generated in this way never gets through to Mr Shakespeare, of course, though he did well ...”

“... biggest provincial Police Force in Britain – Greater Manchester – was called in to command it. John Stalker was an excellent choice. Nothing in his life had distinguished him as a subversive. It is true that his father had been a Labour man, and an admirer of the Daily Herald, but he himself had not shown any such dangerous symptoms. He was a highly ...”

“... When John Wesley visited Bath in 1739 to inveigh against the follies that flourished at hot springs, he was challenged by a fleshy, domineering figure in a white beaver hat, who demanded to know by what authority he was preaching. Wesley’s retort (or so he claimed) was ‘Pray, sir, are you a justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply ...”

“... clerks, trying to build the party in the South, would register anyone. They became Republicans. John Rice and his father were Presbyterian preachers, and Condoleezza retells, almost word for word, the story from her 2000 Republican National Convention speech about how her grandfather became a Presbyterian as a college student: Granddaddy Rice … had no ...”

“... When John Aubrey discovered that Milton had written some panegyrics of Cromwell and Fairfax, he eagerly sought them out for their ‘sublime’ quality: ‘were they made in commendation of the Devil, ’twere all one to me: ’tis the hypsos that I look after.’ Aubrey’s brief lives of the leaders of the Puritan revolution retain something of his youthful excitement at the sublimity, the magnanimity in defence of liberty, aspired to by the Devil’s party ...”

“... her ‘misfortune to suffer very great mischiefs from the assistance of architects’; Sir John Cope, of Bramshill, whose ‘apartments are so vastly spacious that one generally sees Sir John toward the winter put on his hat to go from one room to another’; John Mytton, of ...”

“... doge, bred contempt for an official who was seen as no more than a ‘tavern sign’, a ‘painted king’, a ‘dumb figure’, a ‘King of China’, as contemporaries variously put it. This divorce between power and status may even have helped bring ritual itself into disrepute as ‘mere pageantry’, shadow without ...”

“... of espionage, where every straight action is mirrored by treachery, where the agent provocateur is king. Charles Nicholl has previously written on alchemy in the Elizabethan age. ‘As above, so below’: this was the maxim of alchemists. It works in the real world too. The factious giants of Elizabeth’s court are supported by a vast root-system of ...”

“... straight in the eye: ‘each man fixed his eyes before his feet./Flowed up the hill and down King William Street’. This sampling outlines a familiar story about the modern city: it’s the place where the strength that was meant to come in numbers has been hollowed out or fractured. Carlyle saw London as ‘a huge aggregate of little systems, each of ...”

“... pays off his creditors, so earning himself the congratulations and a cash sum from the (Bourbon) King of France. Was this another of Balzac’s dreams for himself, of a debt-ridden legitimist being graciously bailed out at the last by his monarch? In fact, his debts were eventually settled by the rich widow Hanska, by now the owner of a large estate in the ...”

“... Chevalier, after witnessing the excitement with which the citizens of Rouen came out to welcome King Louis-Philippe. And then, as time went by, stupidity went from being merely laughable to being intolerable. By the time he wrote Bouvard et Pécuchet, his intolerance had reached the point where he described it as verging on ‘dementia’, and he meant this ...”

“... a considerable art to make high science and advanced technology both intelligible and interesting. John Tyndall and T.H. Huxley were distinguished scientists who had this gift – which was not shared by all their contemporaries, whose books often drifted off into dullness or idiosyncratic technicalities. There is no convincing evidence that our own scientific ...”