“... of wool for £210. Like the glover’s paring-knife, these ‘tods’ (a unit equivalent to 28 lb) resurface in a play-text – this time in The Winter’s Tale, where a shepherd struggles to reckon up the value of a shearing: ‘every ’leven wether tods; every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to?’ By my ...”

“... He also took against the Corsicans, who combined ‘the worst qualities of the Italians and the French’. Later, when he was nearly forty and owned a house in Verbier, he delivered his opinion on the Swiss, or, as he put it, ‘the goddam Swiss’: they were, he wrote, ‘the ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He ...”

“... in his office and in the same way the pupils of another candidate for secular sainthood, the French philosopher Simone Weil, saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical un-wisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s. One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The ...”

“... it featured Hamlet, dated from a decade or more earlier; it seems to have taken its events from a French prose narrative of the 1570s, which itself translated and adapted a Norse legend embedded in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Danish History. The original Norse legend is very brutal and very bloody. The further source or impulse of Elizabethan revenge ...”

“... published in newspapers and magazines. She had worked ‘in service’, including as a maid to Katherine Mansfield’s grandmother. Frame’s father was a railway worker of Scottish origin, who fished, did embroidery and bagpiped the children to sleep. There were five children, and Janet came in the middle, the survivor of a pair of twins. The Frames owned ...”

“... adept at Internet navigation – ever Googles me and sees what I’m writing now, I doubt if she’ll be pleased.Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty ...”