“... Welsh songs at the top of his voice, while his friend accompanied him on a penny whistle. Edward Thomas must have remembered his companion’s musical habits a few years later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in ...”

“... A year or so before his death in 1788, Thomas Gainsborough made a series of chalk sketches of ‘a poor smith worn out by labour’. In some of them, the smith appears as a woodman, carrying or sitting upon a bundle of faggots; and though woodmen appear in a large number of his drawings and paintings from the 1750s onwards, these particular sketches seem originally to have been made in preparation for what he was to regard as his greatest picture, ‘The Woodman’, executed in 1787 and destroyed by fire in 1810 ...”

“... and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that ...”

“... set in among the Royalists on the opposite hill. Standing next to Baxter was the godly Major Thomas Harrison. As the Cavaliers broke and fled, Baxter heard him ‘with a loud voice break forth into the praises of God with fluent expressions, as if he had been in a rapture’. Exultant vengefulness was common in the Civil Wars of the 17th century, which ...”

“... The current chief justice is John Roberts, who was nominated in 2005 by George W. Bush. Clarence Thomas, the most senior associate justice, was nominated in 1991 by George H.W. Bush. Stephen Breyer was nominated in 1994 by Bill Clinton, Samuel Alito in 2005 by George W. Bush, and Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latinx on the Court, in 2009 by Barack Obama, who ...”

“... anyone wanting to retell the tale can pick and choose, ignoring conflicts of testimony and adding more if desired. It does not bother many people that Matthew and Luke supply contradictory accounts of the holy family’s straitened accommodation in Bethlehem, or of the Annunciation, or of later events in the life of the boy Jesus, like his teaching in the ...”

“... Alan O’Connor’s appreciation of Williams, despite its strangely wooden, distant quality, sheds more light on his lengthy (1946-61) involvement with the WEA than does anyone else – though still not enough. In particular, one would like to know more of how Williams saw his own career, which, for all his radical Welsh ...”

“... and sent to the House of Correction in Brixton for fourteen days. Up for the second time, Thomas Cooper was alleged to have stolen a machine for sweeping chimneys which belonged to John Deaton, and was committed for trial. James Ryall, John Burridge, John White and Thomas Wall were re-examined for passing ...”

“... the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing our language not from the humanity of the Greeks and Romans, but from the savagery of the Goths and Anglo-Saxons. We are about to reverse the Renaissance.’ Not for the first time, an ...”

“... man working for a large company’ was not the sort of plot point to get a reporter begging for more. ‘It has implications,’ Heller added. For the next 12 years Heller worked with this material as it emerged in ever darker and more dismal tones. It seems to have come one painful sentence at a time. He distracted ...”

“... properties, while they waited for help to arrive. A surgeon patched Wood up, and sent him to St Thomas’s Hospital where to everyone’s surprise he made a full recovery within two months. This minor miracle – doctors were baffled by the lack of arterial bleeding – was celebrated in an engraving in which a lank-haired, classically draped Wood stares ...”

“... Life by Other Means, derives from an Enright poem called ‘Poetical Justice’ which muses rather more ambiguously on the relations between art and life than the stirring phrase might suggest in isolation. Dr Johnson, one of Enright’s touchstones, records how he was so shocked by Cordelia’s death in King Lear that he could never bear to reread the ...”

“... at interrogation centred upon food rather than sex. English diarists – Evelyn as well as Pepys, Thomas Turner as well as Parson Woodforde – confide their meals to paper as readily as their other concerns. One reason why Keats makes better reading than Shelley is that he had a superior gust for eating and drinking, and found a language for it in verse and ...”

“... Castelnau one of us or one of them? In the dangerous, knife-edge politics of the time, was France more than half a friend or more than half an enemy? Where did de Castelnau stand in relation to his master, Henri III, or to his own servants? He had been using the diplomatic bag, which passed from Paris through Salisbury ...”