“... who was on the fringe of my family circle (the best friend of a cousin by marriage), and Nicholas Riasanovsky, a Russian historian. We were to give out money for graduate research projects. I couldn’t call Alexander ‘Onkel Paul’, as I might otherwise have done; ‘Onkel Nick’ was out of the question. And I couldn’t address colleagues as ...”

“... for radicals. During this happy exile he spent time with the critic Vissarion Belinsky, and with Nicholas Maier, a liberal who was the model for Werner, the doctor Pechorin meets in A Hero of Our Time. This was the first of three such punitive sentences. He returned to St Petersburg in 1838, where he wrote A Hero of Our Time and his long poem ‘The ...”

“... of Sir Edmund Backhouse, and concerned with a character no less shadowy and bizarre, the atomist Nicholas Hill. A rogue Catholic and a disciple of Giordano Bruno, Hill seems to have promoted a little-known rebellion on the death of Queen Elizabeth, a doomed and farcical adventure apparently intended to establish, on the unpromising soil of Lundy Island, a ...”

“... for the English ones, though when visitors beat a path to his door they weren’t always welcome. Nicholas Zurbrugg came for three days, leaving Finlay ‘not only exhausted but somehow furious at all such people’. Anathemas were pronounced. Harold Cohen was ‘never to be mentioned again. He is an ignorant person’, Donald Davie was a ‘wretch’, and ...”

“... may be seen in an examination of two sections dealing with overtly political writings. Nicholas Canny and Andrew Carpenter introduce ‘The Early Planters: Spenser and his Contemporaries’ by reaffirming Spenser’s status as a great poet in the English tradition, and then by redescribing him as an ‘apologist’ for English rule in ...”

“... Isaiah Berlin, Tippett, Betjeman and Fred Hoyle became familiar voices. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas made a poet’s living in what Thomas called ‘the thin puce belfries’ of the Third. Guided by the producer Douglas Cleverdon, Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All That Fall came into being; and drama thrived – the ...”

“... of national politics to address a wider audience of freer thinking international readers. Thomas More’s book of Latin epigrams was the first printed volume of classically derived Latin verse by an Englishman. It appeared first in 1518, bound with the second edition of Utopia, and it shares both the brilliance and the elusively reforming political ...”

“... Jelinek was already 22. This was the high-water mark in Austria’s radical postwar renaissance. Thomas Bernhard was the acknowledged leader of the dissident pack, with Peter Handke and the Forum Stadtpark group from Graz representing the next wave of an obligatory avant-garde. Jelinek was at the young end of this group, but gained instant recognition within ...”

“... conflicts but about their nature. If there is an orthodoxy under attack, it has been built upon Nicholas Tyacke’s deservedly famous essay of 1973, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution’. According to that view, there was not much wrong with the Church of England until Charles I and Archbishop Laud got their hands on it in the 1620s. Since ...”

“... they came to have their portraits painted ‘in little’ by the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, who lived and worked on Gutter Lane for 35 years. If you were very posh or very rich Hilliard came to you, but his bread and butter was what he called ‘common’ work – in other words, doing portraits of commoners – and this more middling ...”

“... a local duchess strongly suggest a rather comfortable style of rebellion. Little wonder that Dylan Thomas, who came across the Out of Bounds group in the mid-1930s, thought they had ‘no idea of what they priggishly call “the class struggle” … They are bogus from skull to navel.’ The sequel to the elopement and marriage was marked by tragedy. Romilly ...”

“... today’s dollars. The seamstresses of the International Latex Corporation were extraordinary, as Nicholas de Monchaux explains in his 2011 book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo. ‘The most valued seamstresses were those like Roberta Pilkenton, who could sew together the outer Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment’s 17 concentric layers, with hundreds of yards of ...”

“... Morrison, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Alan Jenkins, Clive Wilmer), the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more ...”

“... tradition that Shakespeare acted the part of Hamlet’s ghostly father (first mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book 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 ...”

“... in particular make it possible to identify Burton’s circle of scholarly friends, among whom Thomas Hobbes was the most famous. Many others were famous in the history of early Oxford science: Henry Briggs, Thomas Lydyat, John Napier, Edmund Gunter. Almost three quarters of his collection, in fact, was made up of books ...”