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“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... position to propagate Catholic views, and he returned to England in 1856, where he was asked by John Henry Newman to go to Dublin, with the prospect of becoming professor of English literature at Newman’s new Catholic university. It was a disaster for Julia, Arnold’s wife, but ” to Newman it felt like a providential coup: the son of the leading ...”

“... biological nephew) Charles Rochemont Aikin, who bore his mother’s maiden name as his surname and took his father’s first name as his middle name. (Miss Aikin married Rochemont Barbauld, a teacher of Huguenot descent, in 1774.) Such latticework sums up the complex, loving and productive exchanges of the Aikins, a brilliantly adaptable clan of rational ...”

“... tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to release him, invoking the provisions of Magna Carta against imprisonment without trial. The Great Oliver then committed Maynard to the Tower, summoned the judges and told them ...”

“... authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that even the ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... or deport gay people from Ireland. Tom Inglis’s book deals with the ways in which Catholicism took root in Ireland. ‘It was peculiar to Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘and it was to have a lasting effect, that the whole civilising process took place in and through the Catholic Church. Due to the absence of a native rural ...”

“... This was not some panicky ‘collateral damage’ fire-fight: the men of Charlie Company took a long time to dishonour and dismember the women, round up and despatch the children and make the rest of the villagers lie down in ditches while they walked up and down shooting them. Not one of the allegedly ‘searing’ films about the war – not ...”

“... man, though hardly to redeem him. Purdy’s early stories have nothing so fierce to show. He took more risks in his first novel, the picaresque-satirical Malcolm (1959), but his novel-writing career amounts to a series of lurches towards explicitness and even extremity, alternating with retreats to safer ground. His second novel, The Nephew (1961), is ...”

“... circuitous route, adaptation had come around to at least the prospect of elimination. Few people took Reagan’s rhetoric seriously, until Mikhail Gorbachev sensed, on meeting the President for the first time in Geneva in 1985, that he might actually mean what he was saying. The new Soviet leader tested this possibility with a proposal for the outright ...”

“... taxonomists who gave the names to the fossils. Suppose that in some lineage evolutionary change took place at a more or less steady rate, to such an extent that the earliest and latest forms are sufficiently different to warrant their being placed in different species. If there is at some point a gap in the record, because suitable deposits were not being ...”

“... Ballin, compiled 54 ornately-bound volumes of diaries, which his son eventually entrusted to John Vincent for editing ‘That Lord Crawford was a man of distinction was agreed by all,’ attests Vincent, who seems unduly impressed by royal letters of condolence. Nevertheless, Vincent admits to finding it slightly difficult ‘to convey something of his ...”

“... pet, was unmarried at nearly twenty-five – ‘a queer little fish’, a feminist, when he took her to Rome in 1889. She had permission (she was musical) to play the organ at St Peter’s. Among the listeners was a middle-aged Prussian officer, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin. The Count admired her and pursued her through Europe, but to ...”

“... it, as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, and the arrival in 1605 of a man with a mission: John White, known to posterity as the ‘patriarch of Dorchester’. All Christians should live according to Christ’s teachings, lay up treasure in Heaven and follow God rather than man. Evidence of their doing so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find ...”

“... the fact that few of his contemporaries regarded Orwell’s writing highly in the Thirties, or took his ideas seriously. And this comparative disregard lasted well into the war years. His ‘As I please’ column in Tribune amused and irritated, the articles on boys’ weeklies and vulgar comic postcards were a novel approach to popular culture, but they ...”