“... 18th century. And never can an amateur production have had a stranger setting; effectively, the Stone Age crossed with Newgate. The first boatloads of 730 convicts (160 female) and 250 free persons, mainly marines, left England in May 1787 under the command of Captain (later Governor) Arthur Phillip, reaching Botany Bay nine months later. Finding the ...”

“... David tells the story of a BBC script conference in Belfast in the late Seventies. A playwright, Harry Towb, had submitted a script about Ulster’s part in the Second World War. There was a line in it about a young guy, Ray Hughes, who’d joined the British Army – ‘amazing, and him a Catholic!’ one character chipped in. David had objected ...”

“... which begins, ‘Long night succeeds thy little day;/O blighted blossom! can it be/That this gray stone and grassy clay/Have closed our anxious care of thee?’ The vicar of Shepperton church, where she was buried, objected to the first line because it made no provision for immortal life; he and Peacock quarrelled bitterly over it. Jane went mad with ...”

“... briefly leaves himself to become his lover, he feels, ‘in the ongoing rush and clatter of being Harry’, not just his hopes and fears but ‘something else’: ‘The sum of his days’. At the opening of The Hours (1999), Virginia Woolf lies drowned at the bottom of the river while the scene unfolding on the bank slowly enters the wood and ...”

“... were the early days of the Troubles. In 1971 Peter Robinson became politicised when his friend Harry Beggs was killed by an IRA bomb. He was an early member of the DUP founded by the magnificent fundamentalist preacher Ian Paisley. Their first child, Jonathan, was born, and Iris was brought low by post-natal depression. She sought relief in her local ...”

“... at Freienwalde, as well as constructing a neoclassical villa to his own design in Berlin. Count Harry Kessler, a close acquaintance, thought the villa tasteless and snobbish, full of ‘dead Bildung, petty sentimentality and stunted eroticism’. The novelist Joseph Roth, by contrast, said Rathenau ‘lived wonderfully, among great books and rare ...”

“... from heaven was to be allowed to rally the levies of the south-western counties at Ecgberht’s Stone (which Adams locates at Penselwood in Somerset), before beating the Vikings at the Battle of Edington in May 878 and imposing on them a treaty and a boundary, which – for once, and for a while – they respected. This started the long process of ...”

“... was supposedly not for sale, nor why he provided a PR contact (who, it seems, now works for Harry and Meghan). According to Lewis, Simon and Parish began to look for buyers soon after the exhibition closed.Lewis interviewed the five external scholars consulted by the National Gallery in 2008, all of whom figured in Simon’s list. According to him, two ...”

“... the poem that, officially, Southey took a dim view of the fatalism he believed to be ‘the corner-stone of Mahometry’; but in the play-space of poetry nothing excited him more. The only really foolish characters in the poem are Thalaba’s opponents, who ceaselessly try to stop him as though they inhabited a universe of normal moral luck and stood the ...”

“... published and when David Lipsky conducted a book-length five-day interview with him for Rolling Stone, now published as Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. He didn’t want the pressure, he said, of depending on publishers for advances: ‘I fear that pain more than I want the money.’ He found publicity ‘toxic’ and mistrusted the ...”

“... of a craftsman.   Incident by incident in the beautiful story he identified on the blurred stone ...   Here was the devout Asita, the pendant of Simeon in the Christian story, holding the Holy Child on his knee while mother and father listened; and here were incidents in the legend of cousin Devadatta. Here was the wicked woman who accused the ...”

“... blood pump through my body, calming me.’ She improved her Italian by reading a translation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire; Viktor Frankl’s memoir of his confinement in Nazi concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, served as her ‘How to Survive Prison’ manual. She sang, at the top of her lungs, every song she knew by heart: the ...”

“... researching the effects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for the head of the agency, Harry Hopkins; fifty years later in Britain, she watched the gap between the rich and the poor widen again, and she railed against the spirit of Thatcherism. Two days before she died, at the age of 89, she was denouncing the Clinton Administration’s plans, with ...”

“... Hopkins, who taught there. A propos Henry VII, what happened between 1485 and 1500? How did bold Harry Tudor of Bosworth Field turn into the crabbed penny-pinching accountant that is his usual representation? 24 March. A film beginning with a man being shepherded through a darkened hall; glimpses of paintings, a shaft of light on a plaster ceiling, the gleam ...”

“... of wife-swapping in New England against the backdrop of the Vietnam War sinks my heart like a stone to the riverbed of my body; even so, I can say with reasonable assurance that the book is bad. Something chants behind the prose, even when it’s good: waste, waste, waste, waste. Sodden somehow, as if the sad Old Fashioned that Janice was drinking at the ...”