“... the Interregnum in 1660, Pericles was the first Shakespeare play to be performed, with a youthful Thomas Betterton, aged 25, celebrated in the title role at the Phoenix in Drury Lane. In fact Pericles was more than simply popular: the play became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor ...”

“... Rotherhithe’. He stalked twilight zones, dowsing for echoes of Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen and Thomas De Quincey. We are commuters, he wrote, ‘struck by a quarantine whose extent escapes our measuring instruments’. After wartime displacement to Bordeaux, and the horrors of typhoid, he returned to a shuttered Antwerp, drained, estranged from ...”

“... of Ben Jonson, which is probably why Jonson was keen to dismiss them in conversation with William Drummond as ‘but narrations’. His most lastingly popular epigram was ‘Treason doth neuer prosper? What’s the reason?/for if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’ The epigrams also include what must be among the earliest mother-in-law jokes in ...”

“... on the evolution of Pym’s character and Morrill on Pym’s relations with backwoods MPs; Peter Thomas on Court and country cultures) is intelligently deployed, but not always searchingly tested against the events Mr Fletcher describes. And Mr Fletcher is careful to warn us that ‘although this book contains a new narrative it is in no sense an attempt to ...”

“... problems. Parsifal’s sexual-pathological element, which so impressed and disturbed Thomas Mann (an authority on such matters), is one of the Parsifal problems; the issue of whether or not the work is ‘Christian’ is another. Nietzsche isolated these two problems together with a third, which is more peculiarly German: like Hanslick, Nietzsche ...”

“... the penurious and persecuted Górecki was first discovered by a wandering scholar called Adrian Thomas; and fact and fiction can then return together to the industrial grime and sulphurous smoke of Katowice where, in the time of martial law, Górecki was for some while under virtual house arrest, and where he completed in 1981 his marvellous Miserere in ...”

“... re-appeared. In Ireland, the three ‘internationalist’ poets singled out by Samuel Beckett – Thomas MacGreevey, Denis Devlin and Brian Coffey – all stuttered to a standstill in mid-career: MacGreevey turned away from poetry altogether; Devlin never published another collection after Lough Derg and Other Poems (1946), though his best work was still to ...”

“... Prince d’Amour’ for Christmas 1597). This is the set of ‘Cabalistical Verses’ prefaced to Thomas Coryate’s eccentric account of a European tour, Coryats Crudities Hastily gobled up in five Moneths of travell (1611), a book which, mock-patronised by Prince Henry, is introduced by laboriously facetious mock-encomiums from 56 poets, Donne and Jonson ...”

“... have his manuscript corrections, only the edition produced from them by his daughter Anne in 1801. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely, the editors of the Oxford edition, suggest that Anne might well have included changes of her own, as well as those of Richardson’s other daughter, Martha, who had died in 1785. They quote from letters in which Martha yearns to ...”

“... as conservative as Republicans. The great populist wave of the 1890s which led to the adoption of William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic presidential candidate was imbued with fundamentalist Protestantism. Bryan’s ‘leftism’ did not take precedence over his fundamentalist Christianity; nor in his own mind was there any tension between them. They were ...”

“... Steve McQueen’s fame in 1968, after a run of huge box-office successes – The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt – it was Robert Mitchum, his elder by 13 years and a star for more than twenty, who was voted the screen’s ‘godfather of cool’ on America’s university campuses.Both men had got to where they were by doing or seeming to do ...”

“... at right angles to the trunk’. These are the words of the police doctor summoned to the scene, Thomas Bond. It was the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888, and Kelly had just become – at a conservative estimate – the fifth and final victim of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The positioning of the victim’s body is consistent with the other ...”

“... or a version of it.Dickinson’s work first appeared in 1890 in a volume co-edited by Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Julie Dobrow’s After Emily attempts to rescue Todd’s reputation by offsetting her bad behaviour against the extraordinary labour she devoted to transcribing, editing and promoting Dickinson’s work. It also chronicles the trials ...”

“... to grant Pound heroic status from the outset is unwise. Moody nowhere says that Pound read Thomas Carlyle, but Carlyle’s notion of a church of literature taking the place of the Christian Church, and his emphasis on the importance of ‘The Hero as Poet’ (with Dante as the foundational example) and ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’ (culminating in ...”

“... experienced climate change but that they may, in part, have caused it. The palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has suggested that people started assaulting the ozone layer with greenhouse gases about eight thousand years ago, when farming began to replace hunting and gathering. Deforestation carried out by a growing population may have made the world ...”