“... and surly one; and while frankly masculine in appearance, actually had an illegitimate daughter, Helen, whom she was raising as her niece. (Todd would never say who the father was, but Cohen thinks – adding an Oresteia-like touch to everything – that he may have been Todd’s mother’s lover, a fellow named Lukach.) The unfortunate ...”

“... much evidence had to be given about Tenducci’s sexual nature, including from a servant quoted by Helen Berry in The Castrato and His Wife (2012). He was a witness as the surgeon Pietro Massi castrated Tenducci: I clearly saw that … [the surgeon] made two Incisions between the Thighs, and the Body next the Groin, and when these two Incisions were made I ...”

“... he was a supplier of headgear à la mode to an upmarket clientele which had at one time included King James’s fashion-mad consort, Queen Anne, and he was – not least – a familiar acquaintance of Shakespeare. A rather respectable figure, it may seem from this summary, an immigrant success story, though there is also some evidence to suggest ...”

“... Eugénie Servières’s Inès de Castro and Her Children Throwing Themselves at the Feet of King Alphonso IV of Portugal (1822) was both a richly coloured medieval history, and, as Spies-Gans suggests, a dramatisation of the subservient position Servières herself occupied: she had written repeatedly to the French government that year, requesting a ...”

“... to meet – leaders of governments-in-exile, naval commanders, bomber pilots, H.G. Wells, the boy-king of Yugoslavia – was made available. Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy ...”

“... the blonde and sunny Shirlie Holliman [Ridgeley’s girlfriend]’ but didn’t care to be heard: Helen DeMacque, also known as Pepsi.Soon after this, Wham! succeeded in ending their contract with Innervision, signing with Epic, a division of CBS that was basking in the record-breaking success of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The band was rewarded with a ...”

“... the filling more than makes up for it. The chapters on ‘honest’ in Othello and ‘fool’ in King Lear are exemplary studies of how words can express and generate social turmoil, and remain among the best essays ever written on Shakespeare. The reason they’re so good is that they show how each word could be used not just with a range of senses, but ...”

“... in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, were based on Fitzgerald’s early girlfriend, Ginevra King, and her classmate at the Westover School in Connecticut, Edith Cummings, a noted golfer. The men in the story are not so easy to pin down, beginning with Nick Carraway, the narrator. Carraway grew up in the Midwest and might have brushed shoulders with ...”

“... Agamemnon where the unhappiness of the Atreidae – Agamemnon and Menelaus – about the rape of Helen is compared to that of ‘birds of prey who, crazed/by grief for their children, wheel around’. The Loeb translation, quoted by Halpern, has good reason to be ornithologically vague: aigypioi can be vultures as well as eagles. For Halpern, the ambiguity ...”

“... In his book King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild describes the stretch of the Congo River as it approaches the sea: Much of the Congo River basin, we now know, lies on a plateau in the African interior. From the western rim of this plateau, nearly a thousand feet high, the river descends to sea level in a mere 220 miles ...”

“... and newspaper column, that secular sermonette. A lament for the well-meaning replacement of the King James Bible by more narrowly relevant versions reads like a transplanted think-piece. A passage describing the technicalities of roofing (‘with slate roof tiles your pitch can be as shallow as 33 degrees – with stone tiles you must allow 45 degrees or ...”

“... into an alien place – The god’s spume foaming in the prince’s hair – Where do you sail? If Helen were not there What would Troy matter, men of Achaean race? The sea, and Homer – it’s love that moves all things. To whom should I listen? Homer falls silent now And the black sea surges toward my pillow Like a loud declaimer, heavily thundering. As ...”

“... will soon become so. Hill was very taken by the American editor who explained the description of King Offa as ‘overlord of the M5’ in Mercian Hymns as referring to a branch of the British secret service rather than the motorway system. Such contingent stuff enters his poetry with a mordant mischief, as though advertising its transience, a spirit that has ...”

“... some of the celebrated critical spats he had been involved in, unyielding about the iniquities of Helen Gardner, generous about Empson though still irritated (‘Later in his life he made a great to-do about “matters of fact” in literature, but he so often got things wrong’). He had the usual nominal aphasia that comes with age, but uncannily sharp ...”

“... within and between poems. This is, for instance, a characteristic preoccupation both of Helen Vendler’s recent study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and of Paul Muldoon’s collection Hay. Much of early 20th-century avant-garde practice was dedicated to breaking down rules; Roussel by contrast was dedicated to a fanatical but arbitrary imposition of ...”