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“... absent from the Longman edition, we must turn to the 20-volume California edition of The Works of John Dryden, compiled by generations of editors, and published serially between 1956 and 2000). Likewise, and no less justifiably, the prose is absent; save for the prose passages which prefaced or dedicated poems or volumes of poems, such as the ‘Discourse ...”

“... to landscape – at any rate on the evidence of their painting. In the work of Everdingen and Jacob Van Ruisdael there is displayed even a precocious taste for ‘wild sublimity’. Why it failed to develop more widely, or to spread at that period to other parts of Europe, remains a mystery. The one weak section of the book is the discussion of the ...”

“... across ethnic boundaries). Philip Hensher amusingly panned that book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010), which was set on a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki Bay in 1799, as ‘an exotically situated romance of astounding vulgarity’. Hensher took issue with its mysterious, beautiful Japanese maidens and its inscrutable, silk-robed, mind-reading ...”

“... John Haffenden opens the proceedings with a long extract from one of Empson’s letters and goes on to provide a leisurely commentary on it, so, even if you hadn’t noticed the bulk of the book, you’d sense right away that you were in for the long haul. At the end of this first instalment the poet is still only 33 years old and has another 44 years to go; no doubt they will be less action-packed, more sedate – containable, one hopes, in only one more volume ...”

“... wealth. This is not, I think, what voters in Sunderland and Cornwall voted for. Enthusiasts like Jacob Rees-Mogg compare Brexit to the repeal of the Corn Laws. They tend not to dwell on the terrible agricultural depression that set in after the American railways and steamships started bringing corn from the Midwest into the country in the 1870s. Thousands of ...”

“... anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s ...”

“... In​ 1619, for a bet, John Taylor – prolific poet, proud Londoner, waterman, prankster, anti-pollution campaigner, barman, literary celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper ...”

“... marmalade that washed ashore on Sir Edward Mansell’s land in 1583, or the 43 pipes of wine that John Poulson fished out of the Erme estuary in 1630. Canny landowners could do good business out of dangerous stretches of coast. Sir Nicholas Lestrange kept a list of ‘Wreck goods bought’ and ‘Wreck goods delivered’ at his manor in Hunstanton. In 1695 he ...”

“... John Fothergill, the high-handed host of the Spreadeagle at Thame between the world wars, described himself in Who’s Who as ‘Pioneer Amateur Innkeeper’. Evelyn Waugh, sending him a copy of Decline and Fall, inscribed it to ‘Oxford’s only civilising influence’. To those who, in 1931, goggled and giggled at his innkeeping confessions, Fothergill was the contumacious dandy for ever locked in combat with ‘clients’ who fell short of his standards, a man prepared to track down and rebuke a brigadier-general who, with his wife, dropped in to the Spreadeagle to use the lavatory without a please or thank you ...”

“... orthodoxy characteristic of Catharine’s historical writings was partly familial. Her grandfather Jacob Sawbridge had as an MP opposed the Septennial Act of 1716, an effective opiate of the political nation which extended the fallow period between legally required parliamentary elections from three years to seven.In 1760 Catharine Sawbridge married a widowed ...”

“... love it here; real mad fun. Especially the evening game of gin rummy before beddy-by (9.30); the 8 p.m. cup of cocoa.’ The letter was written on 15 November 1951, a few days after James Schuyler had been admitted to Bloomingdale Hospital, a mental institution in White Plains, New York. Schuyler still gets his semi-colons right, and his appetite for gossip is ...”

“... John Maltby​ , the studio potter and sculptor, used to say that you can’t make a teapot about your father’s death. Grayson Perry’s whole career assumes the opposite, that you can express any amount of personal and social comment through traditional forms of craft, not just pottery but tapestry and textile design: the Tate sells a printed silk headscarf of his that wouldn’t look out of place in a county town on market day, but represents contemporary art as a sort of board game, with arrival at the Bankside holy of holies (above the cheeky caption ‘Tat Moderne’) the winner’s reward ...”

“... problems surrounding the familiar poll-tax registration setting of the first Christmas. Mark and John tell us nothing about Jesus’s birth; Matthew sets it in the reign of Herod the Great, to which Luke assigns the Annunciation. Luke’s specificity regarding the circumstances of the Nativity inspires confidence (2.1-5): ‘And it came to pass in those ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to ...”

“... every imaginable peer and rival over the past thirty years. The result was to put the followers of Jacob Zuma in power, initially with Kgalema Motlanthe as president. Ramaphosa remains not quite on the sidelines, an enigmatic and independent figure of considerable stature. The key moment in his biography was the great NUM strike of 1987. He had previously done ...”