“... and annoyed to be asked to write the official biography. It was largely due to his brother John, the art historian who became director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, that Pope-Hennessy was persuaded to take the commission. Royalty, John argued, was ‘an endangered species’ and this was an opportunity to examine ...”

“... The title of John Fraser’s book comes from Hamlet’s most famous speech. ‘The name of action’ is what ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’ lose when ‘the native hue of resolution’ is ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’: not, on the evidence of this volume, too much of a problem for Mr Fraser himself ...”

“... gramophone records of Rumanian church music on the table, next to a pile of prayers composed by John Donne (who also preached at St Dunstan’s). This sturdy English church is encircled with chapels for several of the independent Churches which are in communion with the Church of England, Coptic and Ethiopian, Polish (with a figure of the redoubtable Black ...”

“... Elsie, Strong recalls without irony, was ‘a better class of person’, the same evocative phrase John Osborne used, with heavy irony, as the title of his autobiography. Osborne was six years older than Strong and from a strikingly similar background about which he was equally unforgiving, as was another close contemporary, Joe Orton. The three make a ...”

“... its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent Street to the Regent’s Park. The view south was to culminate in the Prince Regent’s Palace at Carlton House. Long before the work was ...”

“... any definition.’ Newton is enlisted into the gay fraternity, partly on the fictional evidence of John Barth’s Sot Weed Factor; Gray is ‘clearly homosexual’; Akenside is ‘exclusively homosexual’; and Handel is declared ‘more homosocial than the norm for the age’. As Rousseau extends his list to include Burke, Smollett, Cleland and Horace ...”

“... up in Rochester, Upstate New York (coincidentally the birthplace of another sui generis writer, John Ashbery). Abandoning an early ambition to become a composer, he graduated from Haverford College, and then worked for a year on Wall Street. Attracted by ‘the prosperous-seeming world of books’, he had short stories and ‘quasi-philosophical ...”

“... in Latin writing did not always reflect superb teaching in schools and universities. When James Boswell showed Samuel Johnson his Latin thesis, the doctor shook his head at the many solecisms and remarked: ‘Ruddiman is dead, sir, Ruddiman is dead.’ He knew that the high quality of the Latin dissertations previously submitted to the Society of Advocates ...”

“... Sermons, more by Defoe, Smollett and the prints of Hogarth. But if he doesn’t equal Pepys or Boswell in vitality and curiosity, Turner has a powerful advantage over either of them, or indeed over perhaps any published English diarist – the panoramic view his official position gave him of his neighbours’ social behaviour. Unaided, Turner’s diary ...”

“... longer sounds sarcastic or self-mocking. Today, the nearest blue plaque is a few doors down, where Boswell first ran into Johnson 19 years after Haywood left. But if you’ve ever browsed in the WC2 branch of East, a fashion chain, you’ve stood on the exact spot. Even so, the disreputable old Haywood can’t be killed off entirely. It’s hard not to wonder ...”

“... nor the talent to be a serious chronicler de nos jours. The only time in my life I tried to do a Boswell was after an evening on which Elias Canetti had unexpectedly invited himself to supper with us alone. But when, the following morning, I looked through the notes of his conversation which I’d made before going to bed, I found myself quite incapable of ...”

“... of their own heads. It afflicts English studies as it does most others, and had a recent airing in John Carey’s inaugural lecture at Oxford which proposed that scholars handle texts whereas critics only vandalise them by reading them. This double and triple illusion usefully affords occasion for simple restatements: that, for instance, to read at all is in ...”

“... pushing aside one of the pillows on his double bed in Rome. Goethe informed Eckermann, his leading Boswell, that he was not given to plucking poems out of the air: they were all ‘occasional’, rooted in reality. The play Torquato Tasso, completed in 1788, substitutes the court of Ferrara (where Duke Alfonso is proud to have the resident poet ‘as my ...”

“... Opera or The School for Scandal from this reckoning. The tone is likewise snooty towards John Rich: we must hope that the fuller knowledge of Covent Garden practice which is beginning to emerge will permit less condescending treatment. It should be said that Nicoll is good, though brief, on Garrick as director, at a time when London companies ...”

“... When he refers to Heidegger, he doesn’t mean the philosopher but the operatic impresario John James Heidegger (c.1665-1749). In Literature and Popular Culture in 18th-Century England, as in his Grub Street (1972) and its abridged version Hacks and Dunces (1980), he proposes to describe ‘how things were’ or how they seemed to be to the people who ...”