“... which Oxford-modern resolves by printing ‘busil’est’ – an emendation duly defended in Stephen Orgel’s excellent single-play Oxford version2 (‘my thoughts of Miranda are most active when I am busiest at my work’). The Oxford-original gives ‘busielest’ as what the compositor or possibly the scribe misread or wrongly divided in an attempt ...”

“... in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of their apprentices, Stephen Belott. Some years later Belott sued Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £60, and Shakespeare was among those called to give evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. He did so on 11 May 1612, though – somewhat conveniently for Mountjoy – he ...”

“... eyelashes. These, though, were a very dark brown. (‘They’re like those of Elizabeth Taylor,’ I thought. ‘Or maybe Montgomery Clift.’) His eyes, too, were very dark – but a very dark green. He was, moreover, articulate – speaking in full, proper sentences and using no, like, you know, ‘discourse markers’. Although born and raised in ...”

“... out of Tennyson country into the land of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Or Elizabeth Bowen, or Elizabeth Taylor. Mutual marital embarrassment – how un-Victorian and un-Tennysonian – is one of the little things those novelists are so good at conveying. The most absorbing aspect of Ann Thwaite’s altogether fascinating study is not so much Emily Tennyson ...”

“... Waters filthy puterfaction, Our meat and drink were made, which bred Infection.The job of John Taylor, self-styled ‘water-poet’, was to keep the waterways clear. Gruber von Arni paints a grim picture of a Council of War overwhelmed by having too many people dependent on it, too few resources and waves of typhus and plague. Treatment centres were set up ...”

“... and May briefly – too briefly – kindles to it. Woolf compacted her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and those like him, into a double-headed institution, ‘Eton-Cambridge’. (Bruce Richmond was, in fact, Winchester-Oxford.) They kept the cultural wheels of Empire turning, and were necessary, ‘like Roman roads’. The TLS was stuffed with them. When ...”

“... What he liked about books was that they were ‘pure commodities’: copies of the latest Stephen King sold online would be no better or worse than those sold in shops. But no actual shop was big enough to offer all the three million-plus books in print. Two distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, handled ...”

“... begins in Paris, ‘the biggest city west of Cairo’ and ‘five times the size of London’. Stephen Nichols starts his chapter by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly political, partly literary, partly ...”

“... had been expended to bring me to New Mexico, too, along with a group of other British writers – Stephen Spender, Richard Hoggart, Margaret Drabble, Al Alvarez – and various Beat American poets and novelists (California vintage ’57), and academics from different universities, to consider such issues as ‘D. H. Lawrence and his Influence on Modern ...”

“... subject, with one more in preparation that I can swear to and several preceding ones, ranging from Stephen Birmingham’s work to Kitty Kelly’s Jackie Oh! to Jackie Under My Skin by the Yale semiotician Wayne Koestenbaum. Specialist markets within the domain of Jackie studies include Camelot freaks, of course, but also the ‘gay icon’ sub-strain which ...”

“... say, Groundhog Day) than because the situation has been resolved on its own terms. Despite​ Stephen Dedalus’s assertion in Ulysses that ‘amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life,’ motherhood isn’t a particularly common central subject for treatment in fiction. Nevertheless Phillips is working within a ...”

“... to surround themselves with like-minded ministers. The man who has replaced the Blairite factotum Stephen Byers, for example, in charge of minimum wage and trade-union rights, is Ian McCartney – a Prescott protégé who declared not long ago that if he was ever cut in half, the letters TU would be found written all the way through him, as in a stick of ...”

“... and Rusedski, fared so wanly since Fred Perry, in spite of strong players like Mark Cox and Roger Taylor? Polish players – Vladimir Skonecky, Wojtek Fibak – deserve a bit of notice, as does the amazing efflorescence of the Spanish clay-court players, male as well as female, to say nothing of the great Swedish dynasty from Borg and Wilander through to ...”

“... year that his total earnings from Spotify up to that point came to more than $80 million. Even Taylor Swift, once Spotify’s most high-profile critic, has made her peace with it. Swift removed her music from the platform in 2014 – ‘Valuable things should be paid for,’ she said – but relented in 2017. By last year, Spotify had paid her an estimated ...”

“... rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell translation, with refulgent golden shields on the cover and several endorsements on the back, of which the most arresting is by Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget: ‘The poetry rocks and has a macho cast to it, like rap music.’There ...”