“... is the real enemy.’) But he loves Falstaff, not in the old vacant, adoring, incomparable Sir John way, but as a man with a life, and an antitype to the ghastly prince; not a character you would choose to run a country or a university, but a man of style; fat, but compare his way of talking and behaving with Hal’s and it is the prince who seems ...”

“... sour memoir by A.N. Wilson from which even the concept of kindness appears to be absent. What with John Bayley’s Iris and the film of it, and all the ‘coo wasn’t she a one’ coverage of her sex life, she has had too much press as the novelist who did a lot of shagging and then lost her marbles to be given an entirely fair trial for at least another ...”

“... poor-but-honest populace. (Rather as Marie-Antoinette liked turning her thoughts to ‘simple’ shepherd life.) But the ‘King and Collector’ of the exhibition title is perhaps best read as a prince who developed a taste for oils on canvas while visiting the Spanish Habsburg court in a failed bid to secure a wife and who, once crowned in 1625, had the ...”

“... poem associated with Rochester, ‘Upon Nothing’. One is written in the hand of his steward, John Cary, the other in a scribal hand. The second has been meticulously corrected from the first by Lady Rochester, who does not however correct the ascription of three stanzas of the poem to ‘Dux Bucks’ and three more to ‘Fleetwood ...”

“... twenty years to write the book that will be a standard work for the next fifty. As my colleague John Lucas of Merton College has put it, ‘instead of writing books, I shall write articles; instead of writing articles, I shall write CVs.’ If you are a student contemplating an academic career, you do not have to be outstandingly perceptive to see that this ...”

“... San Pietro symbolised the universal sheepfold, the idea of world empire, ‘one flock and one shepherd’, which had long been associated with the millennium. The Academy of the Intronati, poets from Alexander’s home town, had made flattering references to such a world empire on the occasion of the Pope’s election. Given the date, the triumphalism of ...”

“... can, into fantasy. He has some sympathy with the familiar constipation-theory, made so much of in John Osborne’s chronicle-play. ‘Luther’s scatology-permeated language has to be taken seriously as an expression of the painful battle fought body and soul against the Adversary.’ It may be worthwhile to recall that shit is nearly as plentiful in Marx’s ...”

“... organising a student strike; travels through Holland with the Non-Combatant Corps; working as a shepherd with a dog called Finn MacCool; and the destruction of all his paintings at the end of the 1950s. This was followed by a stay on Rousay in Orkney, an island promoted to Finlay’s paradise lost when he was forced to trade it for a psychiatric hospital on ...”

“... Opium and its effects here receive the jawgrinding judgment of James Hogg, the ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1823, soon after the appearance of Thomas de Quincey’s celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Hogg delivers what might be called the Scottish verdict on this awesome substance, a substance full of Eastern ...”

“... you don’t want to worry about that. They’re all the same.’ At which point (we are in Shepherd’s grocers) I hear myself as very rarely shouting at the top of my voice. ‘No, they are not all the same. This lot are self-seeking liars, the cabinet included, and we’re landed with them for another five years.’ She tries to calm me down but I ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... attack’, and by preferring, of the various accounts of Christian given by the survivor John Adams on Pitcairn, the one which is unfavourable. Christian’s Pitcairn was, of course, no more a paradise than Bligh’s Bounty. There were Tahitian women on Pitcairn, but not enough of them, and the results were another, bloodier mutiny and Christian’s ...”

“... there were still the necessary reservations. ‘Poetry is – I fear – incurable,’ he wrote to John Murray in October 1816. ‘God help me – if I proceed in this scribbling – I shall have frittered away my mind before I am thirty, – but it is at times a relief to me.’ To fritter is to waste time, but it also means to break into fragments, a ...”

“... in Shakespeare’s own early Catholics, the coldly wicked and worldly Cardinal Pandulph in King John, manipulator of the young and innocent, or Cardinal Beaufort of 2 Henry VI: compare them with his cosier, story-book brothers like Friar Laurence, or the fundamentally sound disguised Duke of Measure for Measure. Any artist, furthermore, might be expected to ...”

“... fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on anecdotes though not quite so strong on truth) recorded that he once got one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour up against a tree. She protested with ‘Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last as ...”