“... nothing the man has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance,’ Arthur Deering wrote in Sir Samuel Ferguson, Poet and Antiquarian (1931). Perhaps nothing Muldoon has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance as his attempt to present in A-Z form the entirety of Irish literature in these four ...”

“... arms and armour, he stood in the chilly drizzle over what was said to be the grave of King Arthur and chanted an extended, improvised rabbinical-druidic hymn. It evoked the strength and innocence of Blake’s Albion and ended on what seemed to me, at the time, a strange remark, perhaps a challenge hurled from king to king: ‘British poets are ...”

“... John Wayne played a godlike rancher, was Hollywood’s first serious Billy the Kid movie since Arthur Penn’s 1956 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Left-Handed Gun. Although much concerned with issues of law and order, it is not quite an establishment Western. In it, Billy is (initially) among the good guys and, for a while, Wayne’s protégé. The villains ...”

“... was driven to wish, in the course of the 1895 election, that ‘the working classes would pay a little more attention to the history of the growth of this Empire. I wish they would think more of the questions connected with its further expansion.’ It would be interesting to see a detailed calculation of the proportion of the British population directly or ...”

“... they are caricatures not travesties. The Duke of Wellington, whom she knew when he was still Arthur Wellesley, in fact comes out of it rather well: dry, but kind in his way, and unpompous. She found his famous taciturnity exasperating: ‘tried him on every subject I could muster’ but it was ‘very uphill work’. What she liked was his directness. On ...”

“... biographies since the 1990s, while The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966), edited by J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard, were reissued in 1997 and supplemented with Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell in 2000. Gaskell’s image, too, was transformed: the married woman whose earnings were pocketed by her husband, the Rev. William Gaskell, gave way to a canny, adaptable ...”

“... Kaplan, performed the ceremony.Fred entered journalism early, as a gofer for the legendary Arthur Brisbane of the Hearst papers. By his late twenties, when he was at Parade magazine, he’d become ‘Sparks’. Apart from no longer sounding Jewish, the name was almost onomatopoeic, perfectly suited to his charged personality. By 1946 he’d left Parade ...”

“... unhappy adventurer, permanently resentful of somebody or something … a typical poor little American rich boy’. But on the evidence of Lewis’s perceptive and absorbing biography, that verdict falls wide of the mark. ‘Oh my sweet​ , how glad I am that we are not rich,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, after a visit ...”

“... and founded a French-speaking conservatoire. Said’s closest friends at Princeton and Harvard, Arthur Gold, a brilliant Luftmensch prone to tormented idleness, and the future art critic Michael Fried, were Jews. His dissertation and first book were about Joseph Conrad’s explorations of ambiguity and double identities. As Timothy Brennan writes in Places ...”

“... and Kim Jong-un – but, however atypical Snowden was in other ways, this timing was crucial. A little older and he wouldn’t have encountered the internet until adulthood; a little younger and the internet he found would have been the corporate version we have now. His family got its first modem in 1992, when ...”

“... among these a few should nonetheless be works of distinction. Stoner, a book that received very little notice upon its appearance several months ago, is, I think, such a work.’ Williams’s boss’s widow later told Charles Shields, who tells the story in The Man who Wrote the Perfect Novel, that the novelist stationed himself in the English ...”

“... or offering any medical assistance to the wounded – for fear, he said, that his little force might be ambushed. This was extremely unlikely. The crowd of fifteen thousand or more that had gathered on 13 April 1919 was unarmed and peaceable, some of them listening to speeches, others simply milling about and chatting, many of them having come ...”

“... Nixon – from making a catastrophic decision? (‘That raised the hair on the back of my neck, a little bit,’ Hering remembered in an interview with Radiolab earlier this year.) His instructor requested that he put his question in writing. ‘There’s presently a degree of doubt in my mind as to whether I might one day be called upon to launch nuclear ...”

“... hole in the sand. According to the story, which is usually set on a beach, the saint is asking the little boy what he thinks he’s up to; to which the child replies that he’s trying to empty the sea into the hole. When the saint points out this can’t be done, the child – who reveals himself to be Jesus – ribs him, saying that he, Augustine, is trying ...”

“... when even undergraduates wrote as if they were middle-aged – to the magnificent ‘Wrying a Little’, on Cymbeline, Jacobean marriage law and female desire, are nourishing to the spirit. Livy, Machiavelli, Ford, Dekker, Heywood and Jonson all figure in the book, but the main recurring subject is Shakespeare. It is, moreover, good to see the publication ...”