“... clown in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), but the much more complicated character who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the ...”

“... have been known to question the wonders of the BBC Golden Age, noting that, despite Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction, a lot of the Wednesday Plays and Plays for Today won tiny audiences then and would look embarrassingly crude today. Those who believe that all drama aspires to the condition of the single play should note that, by the early 1980s, the ...”

“... when, in the middle of life’s path, the poet loses his way is not unrelated to his loss of his home, of Florence. So hell presents itself first and foremost as a place of exile. To an extraordinary degree death is annulled, in the sense that the dead are to be considered dead only insofar as they are not among the living. Otherwise, however awful their ...”

“... legs’ are ‘pied with water-drops’ from ‘waste-ground’ to ‘the carpets of my home’. Pieings and peeings, spatterings and messings acquire a weird power. In ‘The Secretary’, the speaker, ‘Pantless, under a slim formal skirt’, tells how ‘beard-rash twinkles on my thighs’ and watches a man’s teeth, their defiled whiteness ...”

“... literate people would have had only a general idea that the Odyssey was about a magical journey home and that the Iliad was about war. The few who actually read Homer at this time tended to read Latin translations, such as those by Eobanus Hessus and Lorenzo Valla. These translations made Homer look familiar. They often quoted or adapted lines from Virgil ...”

“... not even noticed and quick as a fish he had darted away leaving Geoffrey to eat alone and return home disconsolate, where Clive duly came by to give an account of his afternoon. True, Clive was not choosy or how else would he have got into bed with Geoffrey himself, episodes so decorous that for Clive they can scarcely have registered as sex at all, though ...”

“... the early Thirties Duggan wrote: Michael Collins and I saw the Casement Diary by arrangement with Lord Birkenhead. We read it. I did not know Casement’s handwriting. Collins did. He said it was his. The diary was in two parts – bound volumes – repeating ad nauseam details of sex perversion – of the personal appearance and beauty of native boys ...”

“... eventually led to Swinton’s proposal coming to the attention of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. Which is how, in January 1915, the future tank became a naval project. Swinton did not learn of this development until late in May, but Churchill had made considerable progress in the meantime. A new Landships Committee was to be chaired by ...”

“... nothing to what they would suffer in the hereafter. London apprentices were ordered to stay at home. Victims were sent ‘into odde corners into the countrey’, in order to get them out of the capital, where Protestant ideas had a firmer hold. Sometimes the heresy-hunters, out of pity or fear of local reprisals, seem almost to have conspired with ...”

“... the Large White and Landrace of modern herds. Among these ‘middle-breed’ pigs we may notice Lord of the Wassail, the first middle-breed boar to take a prize at the Royal Smithfield Show. The bristles of his coat were eight and a half inches long (his breeder, a keen angler, used them to tie fishing flies) and his hide so thick it was fit only to be made ...”

“... were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated patsy/marksman, Lee Harvey Oswald, who looked nothing like the ...”

“... called themselves ‘the godly’ or ‘the true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and ...”

“... Afront page story​ for the Sunday Pictorial in February 1938 was headlined: ‘“Ghost” Wrecks Home. Family Terrorised.’ A recent series in the Sunday Pic, as it was known, had invited readers to share their supernatural experiences. Almost a thousand of them wrote in. Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the South London suburb of Thornton Heath, rang the paper (a ghost didn’t seem a case for the police, she said ...”

“... about the early life of Frank Lloyd Wright, commissioned by Madison Opera, Wisconsin, Wright’s home state. The work was premièred there in April, but not having heard it, I cannot speak for the opera’s music. That, though, would not appear to be much of a drawback. Muldoon’s text was issued in February as a Faber paperback original, uniform with the ...”

“... to be writing fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with ...”