“... while another Hals painting, The Singing Boys (c.1623-27), adorns the companion volume, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture. The Singing Boys is no doubt meant to recall Middleton’s early work for the Children of Paul’s, one of those boy companies whose performances were punctuated by songs and entr’acte music; but the fleshly ...”

“... without charge). In 1918, returned from the dead, he married Nancy Nicholson (daughter of William Nicholson the painter, sister to Ben Nicholson and herself a skilful illustrator and designer), with whom he had three children by 1922, although it was never quite clear how keen the strongly feminist Nancy was on being married to him. Meanwhile he was ...”

“... argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to him, was not for him. This became his pattern of behaviour at ...”

“... penitence his duty to marry Violante. The composition of the play can be dated quite accurately. Thomas Shelton’s translation of the first part of Don Quixote, which includes the Cardenio story, was registered at Stationers’ Hall on 19 January 1612 and published not long afterwards. English writers were certainly aware of Quixote before this ...”

“... envoy of George III. Nobody in Beijing knew why he was there. He assumed that his commission from William Pitt made him an ambassador, and that his mission was to negotiate new trade relations between Britain and the Qing empire. Like many in Britain he believed that the ‘Canton System’ was designed to restrict the scope of British trade at Guangzhou and ...”

“... in a ten-year-old American translation, printed in Great Britain but not otherwise Anglicised. William Hannaher’s translation is particularly effective in its rendering of the author’s virtuoso gifts of metaphor and simile. Kis’s style highlights not only Eduard’s grand visionary projects but the most mundane experiences and objects, from the ...”

“... clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that the careers we might have chosen don’t matter very much: ‘Little by little, the habits, the knowledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes ...”

“... libertarian paternalism of the Cameron and Obama governments gave us Brexit and Trump instead. As William Davies observes in Nervous States, ‘democracies are being transformed by the power of feeling,’ and ‘nostalgia, resentment, anger and fear’ appear to be taking over the world. There has been endless speculation about the reasons for this, much of ...”

“... of Pat Buchanan, the neolithic challenger to George Bush’s renomination in 1992, and William Buckley, the acidulous Catholic pundit, while making us uncomfortable about longstanding liberal assumptions? This brief volume is not an intellectual ‘life review’, to borrow a gerontological term, but a solemn reflection on the philosophical ...”

“... which, in an earlier period, mingled with paintings to form the Wunderkammer of princes. Leopold William is one of the great collectors Brown discusses, and Tenier’s painting of his collection is historically remarkable because it shows only pictures as displayed objects. The artist’s intention is ‘to show the world that Leopold ...”

“... On the jacket of Playing the Game is a portrait of the man who played it: a portrait by William Strang (1859-1921), a Late Victorian artist now much undervalued. He did what is by far the best portrait of Hardy, and his special ability seems to have lain in pleasing his subjects and their public by making them look suitably grave and important, even a shade portentous, while at the same time revealing hidden traces of weakness, perhaps of meanness ...”

“... methods of painting trees, but has surprisingly little to say about Constable. He reveals William Cobbett to be an old curmudgeon who ‘viewed trees much as he did cabbages . . . as utility vegetables’. Mabey misses a trick, being a very southern South Briton, in not giving an account of the rise of the beech as a tree of choice for gentlemen in ...”

“... half of porksteaks’. Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated glosses this: ‘P. Mangan, pork butcher, 1-2 William Street South (approximately a quarter mile south of where Lenehan and McCoy are walking)’. The new Annotations has much more to say:Joyce seems to have mixed up the former occupant. The 1901 Thom’s lists the pork butcher at 1-2 South ...”

“... After working​ on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and Burroughs’s literary style had synergised. Cronenberg apparently mused that were Burroughs to die he might write his next novel. Burroughs expired in 1997, and although Cronenberg has directed many films since then – operas too – while dabbling in graphic novels and other writings, Consumed is his first full-length work of fiction ...”

“... movements. In the late 1860s, his bank account shows regular payments to someone called ‘Miss Thomas’ – Nelly, it’s assumed. He made arrangements for her to accompany him on his last American trip. They fell through. His will left her £1000. Among the controversial facts is that Dickens and Ellen may have had one or more children, who died soon ...”