“... at least) a slew of critical histories of his father, James VI and I, and his decadent court. Anthony Weldon, who is assumed to be the grumpy courtier author of The Court and Character of King James (1650), thanked God the Stuart family had been ruined. His assessment of James as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’ has ...”

“... smaller in stature’. Now I come to think of it, though, that might interest an alien. Francis King, in his autobiography Yesterday Came Suddenly, writes as straightforwardly as he has always done. Every so often in the course of his long career as a novelist critics have spoken of the detachment of his style, nearly all of them meaning it as a ...”

“... that ‘every Shakespeare-lover’ has the right ‘to paint his own portrait of the man’, Anthony Burgess published his version in 1970. Though ‘eschewing invention’, he confessed to an element of ‘conjecture’, adding that the reader should spot his venial departures from fact and excuse them as inevitable in the work of a fiction-writer, his ...”

“... about the best state of a commonwealth in one of his epigrams (it goes roughly: ‘do we want a king or a Senate? – hang on, if we have the power to answer this question then we must already be kings; and if we are not kings we’d better shut up and stay out of polities’). In another he writes movingly to his children while absent from them on royal ...”

“... Laws, which occasioned some of Hunt’s best prose, carefully argued yet passionate? The mad old king? The prince regent for whom bad is not bad enough? Hunt was at his most recklessly brave in his treatment of the monarchy and the government. Regarding Waterloo, with the nation gripped by jingoistic frenzy, Hunt asked: ‘What to us are questions of ...”

“... witchcraft trials and befriended religious visionaries, while Wait served as a military leader in King Philip’s War and a judge at Salem and seems never to have repented either of these activities. Still, he too was a bookman. In a tiny herbal that Charles Howard inscribed to John Winthrop Jr, Wait added a note recalling that the gift had been given in ...”

“... Bohemia from Protestant rebels in 1619 effectively triggered the Thirty Years’ War. The deposed king-elect, Ferdinand, who was soon afterwards crowned Holy Roman Emperor, sent troops to retake his throne in Prague and seize Frederick’s ancestral lands in the Lower Palatinate. Frederick and Elizabeth were defeated, exiled and ever after mocked as the ...”

“... or at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold presence in human life and culture’. Knight concludes that ‘Robin Hood’s biography is mythic in that the multiform figure does not have physical identity.’ His biography is thus ...”

“... random! Who’s your secret server? After ingesting   derivatives Magnus too becomes a vampire. Anthony Hecht likes that, which is not like him at all. (to be continued) Louis de Pointe du Lac’s mortal birth: blood’s all over, every   body slips and slides, and gets sticky (Aw, that’s so     icky!). Mortal Lestat gets into the Grove and ...”

“... party called rather grandly the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms.) His books were popular but not highly regarded, and this worried and baffled him. Why, he asked me once, was there thought to be so much difference between Creasey and ...”

“... by the end of the 16th century was for buffoonery: he was turned into a jest-book figure, and in Anthony Munday’s Robin Hood play within a play, The Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, a ‘real-life’ Skelton takes the role of Friar Tuck. His recovery came on the back of the rise of Modernism, with its opening of readers’ minds to new ...”

“... Vansittart are described in similar terms, but the worst treatment of all is reserved for Sir Anthony Nutting. In his introduction to the new edition of The Suez Affair, Hugh Thomas describes Sir Anthony as ‘the one man who conducted himself consistently and with impeccable honour’ at the time of Suez, and it is a ...”

“... with the possibility. Probably the best account of his youthful self is in the first volume of Anthony Powell’s memoirs, Infants of the Spring. ‘He was one of those individuals – a recognised genus – who seem to have been sent into the world to be talked about. Such persons satisfy a basic human need. Connolly’s behaviour, love affairs, financial ...”

“... and globules of pure fact rise to the surface, the dishomogeneity annoys. Some reviewers of Anthony Burgess’s new novel say it has curdled: ‘so let’s say he does know all Walton’s percussion parts by heart, and has the Hebrew or the Russian word for almost anything, is he able to use them to tell a better story?’ I think he is. In Any Old Iron ...”

“... come to light, and we shall have another insight into relations between the two. The first part of Anthony Grafton’s intellectual biography (‘Textual Criticism and Exegesis’) appeared in 1983. Together the two volumes provide little of a personal nature, but a remarkably rich insight into a vigorous period of scholarship for which the modern world, even ...”