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“... and your sister.’ Stuck in this enforced, accompanied solitude, Wordsworth turned to writing. ‘William works hard,’ Dorothy reported, ‘but not very much in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making ...”

“... ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all. Kafka When H.G. Wells accused Henry James of having sacrificed his life to art James replied, with characteristically artful indignation: ‘I live, live intensely, and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it might be, is in my own kind of expression of ...”

“... death is fleeing the frame on the right. There are no such illusions – another surprise – in James Tissot’s small, brutal watercolour of an event he witnessed on 29 May 1871. It shows a high wall, part of the fortifications in the Bois de Boulogne, and a man in the uniform of the National Guard plummeting backwards through the air, jacket ...”

“... the moment at which Continental demonology was brought to Scotland: it was in 1590, when James VI returned from Denmark with his bride. It is possible, since an arranged marriage is likely to be more traumatic for a homosexual than it is for most of us, that this moment also pinpoints a major attack of sexual guilt in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the border the old Roman road – now the A140 – which heads north from Ipswich towards Norwich. James Bettley, who has already revised Essex, is responsible for the expansion. The Buildings of England series has left Penguin for Yale University Press, who have both overseen the third edition of the series and continued with the new volumes of Buildings of ...”

“... soon took up with the British security services too. The head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, William Melville, worked closely with the Okhrana’s top man in Paris, Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, whose many state-sanctioned crimes probably included overseeing the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Morris thinks Melville wasn’t to know about ...”

“... brother and his wife felt that they had only just managed to keep him from too much drink, but to James himself Kenner’s belief that Stephen cannot become a novelist because he has taken to drink would seem merely typical of Bloom. However, it is consistent that when Bloom sees Stephen being led away from the library by Malachi he fears they are going to ...”

“... Bare and Bald’, Coleridge enjoyed calling her in private, with more antipathy than inspiration. William McCarthy quotes the Table Talk anecdote early on in his compendious and admiring new biography of Barbauld, as though obliged to get it over with, and makes the suggestion that Barbauld had unwittingly revived Coleridge’s severe hang-ups about his ...”

“... led to her own teenage breakdown, feelings of intense despair and, according to her brother William, severe self-repression. Withdrawn and unhappy, he recalled, she gave up chess, ‘simply because it made her too eager for a win’. Whether it was the eagerness she feared or the winning, the poems that began to appear in her journals during these ...”

“... technology, revolutionising trade and naval warfare. The designer was the polymathic William Petty (1623-87) – mathematician, mechanic, physician, cartographer and statistician – and one of his prototypes was called the Experiment. The ship was an experiment in science, technology and entrepreneurship. No one had ever seen such a vessel; it ...”

“... story bears similarities to the influential American conspiracist text Behold a Pale Horse by William Cooper (which was published at about the time Icke reinvented himself as a prophet), and to the pseudo-leaks that drive QAnon, though QAnon tends to avoid the extraterrestrial. A cursory and much rationalised summary of Icke’s conspiracy theory goes ...”

“... Freud must be very unsettling to necessitate such cushions. Enright’s poem ‘Anecdote from William IV Street’ – about a request for the works of Freud and for an artwork of Jesus Christ – succeeds in its succinct ruefulness, the melting sentiment (as Eliot said of Goldsmith) just held in check by the precision of the language. But when telling us ...”

“... When William Laughton Lorimer, formerly Professor of Greek at St Andrews, died in 1967, he left behind him the manuscript of a translation of the New Testament into Scots, on which he had been working for the past ten years. A quarter of the translation was in more or less final form; the rest of it was in a revised first draft ...”

“... For Scotland, there has been work of major significance in the past decade by, for example, William Donaldson, Murray Pittock, Robert Crawford and Andrew Noble. More general studies of emergent nationalism must be relevant to Burns. For while he may not have been a consistent Jacobite or even what in British terms passed for a Jacobin, his attitude to ...”