“... of Timber (or ‘Discoveries Made Upon Men and Matter’). In an age when most writers burned out young, Jonson kept on going. Right at the end, embattled by debt and alcoholism, half-paralysed by a stroke, he was still at work. Among his last pieces was probably the English Grammar, published posthumously in 1640. It shows him still niggling away at the nuts ...”

“... those who were ‘Wrong but Wromantic’. ‘I’m a Whig or little better,’ says Stevenson’s David Balfour by way of apologetic preamble to his admiring recognition of the un-Whig virtues of the Highland clans. Many must have been tempted to agree with W.B. Yeats’s (or his Sage’s) uncompromising answer to his own ...”

“... make of his sailors, like the one who leans on a table spread with good things in Elizabeth David’s Book of Mediterranean Food. The housewives doubtless thought they were nice lads; in life and art the physical types which attracted Minton were butch. The boys in Hockney’s Cavafy illustrations would not have stepped so easily or so politely onto Mrs ...”

“... One of the strongest and strangest moments in David Lynch’s unsettling TV serial Twin Peaks, part of the dream of wholesome investigating agent Dale Cooper, comes when he is kissed full on the mouth by the figure of Laura Palmer, who was a ‘wild girl’ but is now dead and whose murderer he has come to town to detect ...”

“... a minute, it would be ready to be smoked.’ It is no wonder that William’s favourite game as a young child was one called ‘being important’. When I was about three years old somebody gave me a small attaché case and what was then called a ‘stylographic pen’... My game was to rummage about in my case, pull out a sheaf of papers, shuffle them, and ...”

“... historical inquiries, including a definitive study of the Jewish Holocaust. Ratushinskaya and her young husband Igor Gerashchenko, who contributes a dignified note on the circumstances of her arrest, were not Jewish. As he puts it, with rather touching quaintness, ‘the Soviet way of life was equally unacceptable to both Irina and myself,’ and in 1980 they ...”

“... be prime-time viewing. A Frenchwoman, a survivor of Hitler’s death camps, helps an ingenious young Dutch Socialist to outwit the Scrooge-like Establishment. Hundreds of millions of pounds are at stake. The rank-and-file defy the mighty. Law confronts power. Three Governments risk being taken to court. All this is part of the story unfolded by Davids ...”

“... and race ‘functions ornamentally in service to academic publication and career trajectories’. David Sterling Brown’s essay on Shakespeare’s near obsession with white women’s white hands doesn’t bring in his own lived experience, but his monograph Shakespeare’s White Others – in which Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello ...”

“... a golden-haired British gossip columnist called Sheilah Graham, who had, he said, the look of ‘a young Zelda’. The creator of Jay Gatsby wasn’t slow to see through her persona. Sheilah Graham was actually Lily Shiel, the youngest child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who had grown up in a Stepney Green slum. Fitzgerald took it on himself to remedy her ...”

“... as many of the Moon Men, and a few other Apollo astronauts, as were willing to talk to him, though David Scott of Apollo 15 has become a recluse, Armstrong doesn’t do interviews, and while John Young of Apollo 16 made a speech at Smith, both eye and mind contact seemed impossible for him. None of them found celebrity ...”

“... Spinkwell Mills, now Sprinkwell Mills (the need for the extra ‘r’ is a mystery), mostly to young professionals working in Leeds. And the beds are everywhere. On the other side of the ring-road, as if squaring up to Machell’s, there is the enormous redbrick expanse of Highgate Beds: Sleeping Comfort for Everybody. Along Bradford Road and Huddersfield ...”

“... of an intelligence clearly capable of passing the 16th-century equivalent of the eleven plus; and David Starkey’s fluent and vivid account of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in ...”

“... mosque in Manama. Some insight into Jackson’s life in the Middle East was offered recently by a young man who goes by the name DJ Whoo Kid, has a radio show on the New York station Hot 97 and produces work with gangsta-rap outfits with names like G-Unit and Lil Scrappy. According to MTV News, ‘Whoo Kid says he originally connected with Bahrain’s royal ...”

“... explain why Obama won relatively comfortably). Obama had huge majorities among ethnic minorities, young people, single people, gay people. Old people, married people, people with children voted for Romney. On the upbeat account, this is all fine. Obama won among the demographics that are growing; Romney among the demographics that are shrinking. The ...”

“... candidate for Dunfermline East (thanks to his ‘great friend Jim McIntyre’ and a group of young shop stewards from the Rosyth Dockyard, who ‘included Charlie Boyle, Helen Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this ...”