“... in Saudi Arabia (at some point he qualified as a psychiatric nurse), he finds his elder brother, James, roosting in the family home; they fight, and Uncle James falls down the front steps, and Laurie with him. Bayley’s elliptical style doesn’t make clear exactly what happened. But it is Laurie who goes to prison and ...”

“... we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is defensible, given the extent to which the tragedy uses Lucian and Plutarch’s ...”

“... Fox examine the literature and politics of early Tudor England, especially of the reign of Henry VIII. Mayer’s concern is the literature of political theory. His study examines the ideas of Thomas Starkey, the friend of Cardinal Pole and adviser of Thomas Cromwell, and centres on the programme of reform announced in Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole ...”

“... written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of ...”

“... masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare’. That perverse distinction has of course been conferred on Coke’s ...”

“... blood: the shocking execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and the debilitating nosebleeds of James II, which prevented him from defending his crown at Salisbury against William, his son-in-law as well as his nephew. The caesura comes on 30 January 1649 with the public execution of Charles I. A Dutch pamphleteer punned that the English (Anglorum) could no ...”

“... Burrows has put onto his computer as controls a small group of novels by others. They are Henry James’s The Awkward Age, E.M. Forster’s Howards End and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, together with two modern attempts to imitate Austen’s Regency English, Georgette Heyer’s Frederica and the continuation of ‘Sanditon’ by Another Lady. He ...”

“... and another ‘byrde of America’, possibly a blond-crested woodpecker from Amazonia. In 1569, Henry VIII’s former barber-surgeon, Edmund Harman, erected a monument to his family in the parish church at Burford in Oxfordshire, with his sixteen children kneeling at the base beneath four naked figures, believed to be likenesses of Tupinambà ...”

“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... make him disdain the disgraces of the legal system and fear the cut and thrust of the courtroom. Henry Crabb Robinson recalled a revealing incident in Norwich City Court. Austin was offered a brief, to which he reacted as if ‘a thunder bolt had fallen’. Not only could he not utter a word, even when prompted, but he also rejected his fee. ‘And then I ...”

“... achieved his great portraits of the king, courtiers and gentry, and Torregiano was sculpting Henry VII for Westminster Abbey. But, though there were notable writers (Skelton, Wyatt, More, the great translators of the Bible like Tyndale), the country’s literary culture was relatively thin: it lacked character and cohesion. By the end of the 16th ...”

“... had fizzled out. Any credit belonged to the Lincolnshire gentry, who had regained control. So Henry VIII ordered the disbandment of an Army Royal, also numbering about twenty thousand, which had mustered in Bedfordshire to confront the insurgents if they advanced on London, and, if necessary, to move into Lincolnshire to solve the problem by brute ...”

“... and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton dwells exclusively on the author’s ‘patron saint’, Harriet Weaver. Surprisingly – for a study whose main concern is the suppression or revelation of intimate materials – he does not discuss the Stanislaus Joyce-Richard Ellmann ...”

“... Jimmy Carter put it very gruffly, when he said that both America and Vietnam had suffered equally. Henry Kissinger, in his memoir Years of Upheaval, phrased it even more prettily: ‘Hanoi and Washington had inflicted grievous wounds on each other; theirs were physical, ours psychological and thus perhaps harder to heal.’ This connects perfectly to the ...”

“... and she was determined to keep her identity hidden, if not from London circles (her brother Henry couldn’t resist boasting), then at least from the circles she moved in. Propriety was a factor, of course, but she doesn’t appear to have been constrained by it. Her letters show that the money was useful and the success of the books ...”