“... 68-78. I have cheated slightly by removing a single line, but even so this passage would look much more at home in the speech in which the old king tells Cordelia’s hitherto enthusiastic suitor Burgundy that her price is now fallen than it does in its actual dramatic context. The speech forms part of a long, irrelevant piece of dissimulation in which the ...”

“... set off for Madrid incognito. They wore false beards, and they called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only coins they carried were of a suspiciously large denomination. A ferryman to whom they gave a ...”

“... outside, the lawyers who stood between the accused and the gallows commanded admiration, and none more than William Garrow, the most successful and most celebrated defence counsel of the later Georgian years. To Langbein, however, Garrow is an object of contempt. He rates over ten times as many index entries as ...”

“... of posterity’; this died, inevitably, with the Coalition in 1922, but a close relation emerged more than twenty years later in the famous TUC Carthouse –‘a dear old thing’, Low wrote, ‘with a noble past and probably a glorious future’. There had also been carthorses in his Australian days, as well as a number of proto-Blimps. Low created his ...”

“... takes it seriously on its own terms? Such an account need not involve ‘belief’ in it, any more than a sympathetic account of Newton’s alchemical experiments need imply that the philosopher’s stone really exists, or admiration for Hobbes (Boyle’s chief critic) any reluctance to use a Vacu-Vin. Geneva focuses on Lilly’s prognostications of ...”

“... volatile moment, then, Schwitters was attacked from both sides, and his reputation has remained more or less stuck in that limbo ever since: too blatant for some, too bourgeois for others.In Poisoned Abstraction, Graham Bader presents the conflict between actual refuse and abstract composition not as an obstacle to the work but as our way into it. In doing ...”

“... charge was false, but in the following year the political world was rocked by the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury in the Tower by agents of the wife of the king’s then leading minister, Overbury’s enemy the Earl of Somerset. The stories that came out, of the drugging of tarts and jellies and wine smuggled into the Tower, roused an intensity of interest ...”

“... Bacon’s the tobacconist, and on Bacon’s wall, if it stands yet, there’s an engraved poem by Thomas Calverley of which I can still quote a stave or two when maundering over the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in ...”

“... Alan Chedzoy’s life of the first Mrs Sheridan (the noted soprano and beauty Elizabeth Linley) is more boisterously entertaining than either of them. The subject of all this feverish activity was born in Ireland to a theatrical father and moved with his family to England at the age of eight. After a miserable period at Harrow, the young Sheridan settled with ...”

“... In​ her new book, Rosemary Hill characterises the achievements of more than thirty antiquaries of the late 18th and early 19th century whose records of mysterious inscriptions, stone circles, monastic chronicles and ruined abbeys, and whose collections of rusty weaponry, stained glass and old ballads, provided new ways by which the past could be recovered – and also, of course, invented ...”

“... prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two ...”

“... we, the beneficiaries of progress and hindsight, would find questionable. Pre-modern reasoning was more deductive than inductive: man was the measure of all things, geocentricity sidelined the sun and unseen forces were morally reflexive, harnessed to turbulent inner lives. These forces were personified as angels and demons and reified in the shape of heinous ...”

“... In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Beckett in 1938, Thomas McGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’* Beckett was in Paris when he read the essay ...”

“... The​ retrospective of Richard Estes’s work (until 8 February) is dazzling in more than one sense. From the late 1960s, when he established his mature style, his paintings of New York make use of hard, reflective surfaces like plate-glass shop windows, car bonnets, fenders and windscreens to fragment, distort and multiply images, replicating something of the visual complexity, speed and energy of the city streets ...”

“... literary stimulus, Trocchi did well to last to 59. Burroughs, whose substance abuse has been even more notorious, is now 70. A Grand Old Junky. An aroma of Establishment dignity now attaches to him. In the early Sixties, Henry Brooke, the Home Secretary, saw fit to deny him a visa to stay in Britain. He was undesirable. The TLS did all in its power to keep ...”