“... John Jones, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford, has written a number of good, idiosyncratic books on topics as diverse as Greek tragedy and Wordsworth, together with an excellent novel, The Same God, published in 1972 and apparently without a successor. He has now produced a good, idiosyncratic book on Shakespeare ...”

“... married women could not. At a time when spinsters were barred from most crafts and trades, they took advantage of the few rights they had, and participated widely in credit markets: only the scale of Jeffreys’s investments was unusual. In any case, in early modern England, where financial and social credit were practically synonymous, wealth could lift ...”

“... In June 2001, John Dower, a historian of Japan, wrote a comment piece in the New York Times about the blockbuster movie Pearl Harbor. The problem with it, he thought, was not its predictable romantic digressions or historical errors but its moral obtuseness. Like earlier films on the subject, it was ‘a paean to patriotic ardour and an imagined American innocence … sanitised to an attractive level of virtual violence ...”

“... Doctors prescribed mercury pills; home remedies were equally alarming. At least one vigilant madam took to scrubbing out her prostitutes: ‘She us’d often to say of her Girls, These Chitty-Faces make me undergo more Fatigue than a Vintner’s Boy, for I scower their Insides as clean, every Night, as if I made use of Shot and a Bottle-Brush.’Gonorrhoea and ...”

“... the First World War, and then as government actuary with an office in the Treasury from 1917, he took a red pen to anything that smacked of profligacy or radicalism. In the cause of fiscal rectitude he could be creative too, teaming up with the then minister of health, Neville Chamberlain, in the 1920s to shift the state-funded old-age pensions scheme onto a ...”

“... may have visited Texas on one of his lecture tours, but Junior, as far as it is known, never took his S&M revelry beyond the Ivy League – novelists will have to invent a chance encounter in a basement club in Austin. Moreover, Junior’s general ignorance of all things, except for professional sports, naturally extended to the nation known as ...”

“... analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in exploding or eluding it. Magazines, then, make for a nice object of study: still recognisable to both writers and readers as ‘literary’ entities, yet governed by social and material constraints, and neatly categorisable in ways that the great ...”

“... a window in 1592, when the child was only 15 months old. Herrick was brought up by his uncle, who took charge (more or less benignly) of his inheritance and set him up as an apprentice to his father’s trade. That career didn’t take, and once Herrick came of age and could spend his own money he went to the flashiest college in Cambridge, St ...”

“... motifs, which they christened ‘grotesques’ and used to decorate Vatican loggie. Antiquaries took a serious interest in the Cloaca Maxima and other sewers. But the Via Salaria discovery was made in a new era. Martin Luther and other Protestants had mounted a challenge to the traditions of the church. Efforts to rebut their ideas had failed, and the ...”

“... disloyalty, ambition, greed, insecurity and all the British hypocrisies that he crashed into. John Preston has made the most of it, providing not only a very readable and amusing book but also the fullest account yet of what actually happened. Some of his sourcing could be clearer – there are rather vague appendices and no footnotes – but he is ...”

“... on in their cabin, and the electric heater – so that it ‘would be warm on our return’. John Thayer, a young neighbour of the Eustis’s in Pennsylvania, shared a suite of rooms with his parents. After the impact, which he noticed hardly at all (‘if I had had a brimful glass of water in my hand not a drop would have been spilled’), he told them ...”

“... Adler asked. ‘I’m laying an egg,’ he replied. ‘What does a chicken know of bombs?’Adler took Marlon into her family: that meant her brother, the actor Luther Adler; her second husband, Harold Clurman, a leader of the Group Theatre, and Stella’s daughter from a previous marriage, Ellen, who was three years younger than Marlon. She and Marlon became ...”

“... munitions and Canadian troops. But the tone of the response changed as the Kaiser’s Government took stock of the reaction abroad, particularly in the United States. Years later, the journalist Mark Sullivan wrote in 1933, Americans could still remember the moment they read the news. Though not captured on film, the sinking of the Lusitania had the same ...”

“... and any biography is doomed to be a progress report, an interim statement. (Contemporaries mostly took Hemingway at his macho word and accepted the Life magazine image of him as a bearded king. It took the shock of his suicide to show the thin ice on which his sovereignty stood, and the black depths below.) Despite the ...”

“... was more to all this than shared churchmanship. In a celebrated comparison between Andrewes and John Donne, Eliot maintained that Andrewes was a ‘medieval’ rather than a ‘modern’ writer. He valued Andrewes because his magnificently dense prose subordinated personality to the demands of text, community and tradition. Andrewes bypassed subjective ...”