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“... authority he could find. ‘He was Christ revisited,’ remarked an Australian actress he briefly took up with. On occasion Dylan himself explicitly tried on the martyr’s role: ‘I have a death-thing, I know ...’ he told his official biographer Robert Shelton in one of his more revealing interviews, as if confiding to an apostle. The concerts themselves ...”

“... condition the premises may be’. One party of casual passers-by, seeing workmen and open doors, took a look inside and were surprised to find Gilbert in residence. Contemporary photographs show dark, elaborate interiors in which dramatist and architect (Harold Peto took 7 Collingham Gardens himself) lived like merchant ...”

“... 1946, only to be expelled by a reactionary faculty – he had dared to prefer Cézanne to Augustus John. Forced into national service for 18 slack months, he spent most of the time reading, Joyce above all, and Ulysses became the subject of a first suite of etchings; old media attracted him as much as new. ‘Hamilton was fascinated by the skill, the ...”

“... horseback. William’s humble gifts of fruit and wine could scarcely compete. The Mongol court took more interest in his precious vestments and illuminated manuscripts, donated by Louis for the celebration of Mass. But possession of these treasures only made William’s situation worse: he declined to offer them as gifts, fearing that they would be defiled ...”

“... Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain completes a remarkable biography. No other biographer of Keynes is likely to surpass it, and everyone who has an interest in the intellectual and public life of this country is in Skidelsky’s debt. This third volume starts in 1937, where the second volume left off ...”

“... success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison ...”

“... cloud at the end of Schumann’s life has been seen as overshadowing everything on the way, but John Worthen’s biography refuses idle teleology. An emeritus professor of English at the University of Nottingham, Worthen has written about D.H. Lawrence and the Wordsworth circle and makes no claim to musical expertise; but he has been seized by the Schumann ...”

“... doctors in the hospital of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Russian astronomer Josef Shklovsky took his own pulse to save the doctor the trouble. ‘Seventy-three,’ he reported. The doctor was not merely ungrateful but contemptuous, for the pulse rate, she informed her illustrious patient, is always an even number. On looking into the matter, Shklovsky ...”

“... opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of their baptisms is documented, nor the date of their ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony ...”

“... admittedly, had good reason to emphasise the enactment of Richard’s overthrow, which they took as evidence of the rebels’ seditious intent. But Coke and Bacon were only reproducing the testimony supplied by Meyrick and Phillips, who had no such motive. The only play that could fit the surviving descriptions of it would be one that both centred on ...”

“... amassing a huge fortune as a royal servant, it is certainly unlikely. Apsley’s mother was a St John, from an elder branch of the same family as Cromwell’s Chief Justice, Oliver St John, whose daughter married Apsley’s cousin Sir Walter St John, denounced by his Royalist opponents ...”

“... contact with London than with one another. When the First Continental Congress convened in 1774, John Adams reported that the delegates were ‘strangers’, unfamiliar with each other’s ideas and experiences. What then explains the road to independence? While most accounts of the coming of the Revolution focus on protests in eastern cities against British ...”

“... She hasn’t even managed to persuade Sammy Wilson to wear a mask. When a Ballymena councillor, John Carson, said the pandemic was God’s judgment on Northern Ireland for introducing abortion and same-sex marriage, Foster failed to discipline him. When the same councillor alleged that Covid vaccines were made from the stem cells of aborted foetuses – a ...”

“... which made him bewray his credit’. Historians have wondered what form this literary laxative took. Some suggest that Jonson is guyed as big morose Ajax in Troilus and Cressida (with, according to Honigmann, the diminutive epigrammist John Weever as Thersites). Others say Jonson is a model for Jaques, the embittered ...”