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“... How many Hamlets would you like? A play of that name was performed in the late 1580s. It was probably bloody and Senecan, and probably written by Thomas Kyd. Another one (probably Shakespeare’s) was performed on board a ship anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607 at the request of the captain, William Keeling: ‘I invited Captain Hawkins to a ffishe dinner, and had Hamlet acted abord me: which I permitt to keepe my people from idlenes and unlawfull games, or sleep ...”

“... In all our sets of mental pigeonholes there is one labelled ‘don’t bother’. It contains groups of people and of ideas to which we have decided not to pay attention. These books, in one way or another, relate to such groups. Women are an obvious case. Yet, except in societies which kill off female babies or starve small girls, they cannot be dismissed as a minority ...”

“... away from ‘neutral background’ (or seemed less able to stop himself doing it) than Hunter S. Thompson. Even at the start of his career, he was no believer in journalistic neutrality. Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1937, Thompson was often in trouble with the police, spending his high-school graduation day in ...”

“... early 18th centuries, and his characterisation of household relationships was a little schematic. Ann Kussmaul’s study of servants in husbandry was in its way brilliant, exploiting administrative records to build up a wide-ranging and suggestive picture from the structure and logic of an obscure employment form, but she was not much concerned with ...”

“... Navy. BP took Iran to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. In the summer of 1953, Ann Lambton, an Orientalist who worked for my former employer, the School of Oriental and African Studies, provided cultural ‘services’ to the British government on how best to sow division in Iran. BBC programmes transmitted secret codes to British proxies ...”

“... could have reduced the casualty rate among air crews. This chapter is followed by one about Frank Thompson, whom he knew at Winchester, and who was executed in Bulgaria for fighting with the anti-Nazi resistance. The portrait of Thompson belongs here because it is part of the war, but perhaps also as a contrast with ...”

“... the more exacting erudition of Propp’s morphology of the folk tale and the work of Aarne and Thompson. She is neither populariser nor pedant, but she fears the commercialism by which traditional stories can be coarsened and falsified. ‘This is not the legitimate spontaneous growth which we find in stories handed down from father to son or in customs ...”

“... longer even disguised as ‘James Elia’; the dream-children’s mother is ‘Alice W–’, or Ann Simmons, Lamb’s first love) are so suggestive of Lamb’s regrets, it’s easy to lose sight of how well constructed it is as fiction. But it’s the evocation of the dead brother, and not the dissolving children, ghosts of what might have been, that haunts ...”

“... to this, though the surrounding apparatus floats something more complicated. The dedication is to Ann Cotton, the founder of CamFed, a charity that supports the education of girls in sub-Saharan Africa, as a note explains – so never mind Oxford or Harvard. To read The Last Samurai for the first time is to experience an odd mix of emotions. With its kanji ...”

“... apparently at ease with himself – though guarded about his family’. His housemaster, R.S. Thompson, ‘known to the boys as “Thompers”’, an awkward, balding High Anglican, realised that Cornwell was suffering, and told the boy at a crucial moment that he must choose ‘between God and Mammon’. By Mammon, he meant Ronnie. Cornwell later wrote ...”

“... two cheers to Charles Marowitz, none to Stoppard. The only solidly informative piece, though, is Ann Thompson’s review of recent feminist works on Shakespeare, which points out incidentally but revealingly that no woman has ever been admitted to the exclusive club which edits the major tragedies. Unlike Michael Bogdanov, who claims that The Taming of ...”

“... The detailed stuff on Bogart’s career before Bacall has been covered so often before, notably by Ann Sperber and Eric Lax, Jeffrey Meyers, and Stefan Kanfer. You may opt to hurry through the first two hundred pages to get to 1943. But from then on Mann the researcher, disinclined to fall for the myth, opens up a complicated marriage. The age gap did ...”

“... There is a brief life of Butchell in the first Dictionary of National Biography; it was written by Thompson Cooper, who had an eye for such characters, and who contributed over 1400 biographies, more than anyone else to the original dictionary. Cooper made no claims for Butchell’s importance as a physician, or as an innovator in the history of ...”

“... manufactured look. (He had, in fact, changed it by deed poll from William Guinneach Gunn to Thompson William Gunn – Thompson was his mother’s maiden name.) It was clear, too, that he enjoyed his own style, his wit, his urge to dismiss what was dull and cautious, to celebrate what was dangerous and alive. This was ...”

“... contends that the most consequential mescaline trip of the 1960s was taken not by Hunter S. Thompson, Allen Ginsberg or Carlos Castaneda, but by the biochemist Alexander Shulgin. Administered by a psychologist friend in 1960, it ‘unquestionably confirmed the entire direction of my life’, Shulgin wrote. He went on to rediscover MDMA (Merck had ...”