“... Noye’s Fludde, and they were in peril when the words of that hymn were written in 1860 by William Whiting. A poem can let you step into a moment that is always – or as Culler puts it in his not always light-footed prose – lyric ‘is not the description and interpretation of a past event but the iterative and iterable performance of an event in ...”

“... Not surprisingly, a number of the Freedom Riders later became important advocates of black power. William Worthy and Conrad Lynn – two of the members of the original Journey of Reconciliation – created the all-black Freedom Now Party less than two years after the Rides ended. By 1965, CORE had jettisoned its integrationism for an emphasis on black-led ...”

“... providing water to strangers, and they were civilised ones. Sharia, the environmental academic James Salzman writes in Drinking Water: A History, means ‘the way to water’. There were limits to what Salzman called the Right of Thirst: you could ask for water, but not for enough to slake the thirst of your camels or your fields. Water, in Salzman’s ...”

“... and keeping the maximum number of plates spinning with flicks of punctuation. It would do Henry James’s vision more violence to translate his books into an English deprived of intermediate stops than to render them in a comma-rich Esperanto. The novels of Proust and Mann would lose much of their intellectual flavour if commas were rationed. Céline took ...”

“... In 1598 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to dismantle James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had occupied since their foundation in 1594, so they transported it across the Thames and built their own playhouse on the Bankside. This was the building whose 20th-century replica was christened ‘Shakespeare’s Globe ...”

“... while a quietly seething poisoner would look dreary and unstylishly old hat. In this book, James Whorton makes it clear that dealing death by poison was not, after all, exclusively suburban, although, apart from later industrial disasters, it does seem to have been almost entirely domesticated. The poison in Whorton’s book is specifically ...”

“... women minded it more), then it must have been as obscure as the hurt allegedly suffered by Henry James, since nobody so far has convincingly explained it. Ted’s father and grandfather were convivial, easygoing men, rooted in their native Kent, fond of a drink and ready to pinch any passing bottom. On his 80th birthday, Heath père, who had started life as ...”

“... Bath and presenting himself as junior partner in the enterprise of the leading Bath bookseller James Leake, whose prestigious establishment on Terrace Walk had just been described in the most recent update of Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain as ‘one of the finest Bookseller’s Shops in Europe’. Leake then appears as the sole ...”

“... an assiduous treasurer of the Liberal Club, and his subsequent gruelling stint as an assistant to William Beveridge was a formative professional and political experience; they parted company just before Beveridge started work on the report that appeared, to unexpected public jubilance, in 1942. By then Wilson had joined the cohort of clever young men ...”

“... and myths, mean that it isn’t an easy task to write the history of the artist’s studio. James Hall’s book touches on many things – self-portraits and celebrity, memorabilia and mirrors – and the physical spaces themselves come in and out of view. In this respect, it’s helpful to know that the term ‘studio’ derives from a verb as well as ...”

“... inspired by the transcendent moment when the main character, Binx, observes someone who might be William Holden on the streets of New Orleans. Is he the real thing, or a ghost, a technological anticipation of holography, or just the manifestation of an awareness that such gods as Holden had become axiomatic, as much a model for American manhood as Johnny ...”

“... canvas, and it is not even certain that his lines portraying it, which were first printed under James I, had been written by 1601 (though it has suited some critics to assert, without evidence, that they were ‘censored’). The Government prosecutors, admittedly, had good reason to emphasise the enactment of Richard’s overthrow, which they took as ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... Homer and Virgil and Chaucer accompanied Stendhal and Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy and Henry James; and near the end was one poem that certainly might, in its intensity, be described as ‘short’ – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This almost token poem, a magnificent simple affair that most of us did at school, is the world’s most ...”

“... or, in the view of people with dogs or cats, for dogs or cats. In 1792 the Scottish philosopher James Anderson noted that ‘it’ indicated ‘a high degree of contempt’, suggesting instead the gender-neutral pronoun ou, then common in Gloucestershire dialect. Kentucky’s 1850 Constitution declared: ‘The right of the owner of a slave to such ...”