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“... the title-role). Meanwhile, Behn’s plays have attracted stars as expensive as Jeremy Irons and Christopher Reeve, and she herself, now conscripted to the cause of postcolonialism as well as that of feminism, has been the subject of a Canadian play (Beth Hirst’s A Woman’s Comedy, 1993) and a Scottish novel (Ross Laidlaw’s Aphra Behn: Dispatch’d from ...”

“... in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of Eliot’s work by tracing every possible verbal overlap between the words used in his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts that ...”

“... Shakespeare’s heir than his official successor as principal dramatist for the King’s Men, John Fletcher, the sentimental doyen of romantic tragicomedy. After Marlowe, Middleton had perhaps the most arrestingly individual voice among Shakespeare’s contemporaries; yet whether it is just (or even helpful) to claim for him the title of ‘our other ...”

“... cannot say, for it is a long time since anyone tried. The most influential recent study of him, by Christopher Hill, is more a series of essays than a biography. Morrill’s volume is not a biography either, but it is as accomplished a substitute for one as a collaborative venture could expect to provide. In invoking Elton’s pronouncement on Wolsey, Morrill ...”

“... seized him just before the Battle of Naseby.’In his rumbustious biography God’s Englishman, Christopher Hill diagnoses Cromwell as a manic depressive. When evaluating his performance in government, Hill, as a Marxist, was more plainspoken than some liberal historians, who tend to be mealy-mouthed and cower in the shadow of Thomas Carlyle and the Great ...”

“... his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, Arnold Wesker and his wife Dusty. Naomi Mitchison. Ted Hughes, Christopher Logue (whose recording of poetry and jazz, Red Bird, I’d bought with my pocket money at St Christopher’s), Lindsay Anderson, Fenella Fielding. A Portuguese couple, described to me as ‘a poet in exile and his ...”

“... rehearsal, when the author is the last person anyone wants to see, so I have come with R. and Christopher Simon Sykes to Garsington on the outskirts of Oxford where they are photographing the 17th-century country house, once lived in by Ottoline Morrell. The house will be known to many people for its opera festival run by the late Leonard Ingrams, but I ...”

“... February 1935, for example, deciding to read some drama, he raced through Aeschylus, Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman, Chekhov, Dekker, Dryden, Ford, Heywood, Jonson, Marston, Massinger, Middleton, Marlowe, O’Neill, Sophocles, Strindberg and Webster; in March he went on to Coleridge, Chaucer, Fielding and Petronius, and then had a go at Proust, Mann, Boswell ...”

“... call to record racist or racially dubious songs. Even the reserved and refined Negro bandleader Fletcher Henderson, a college graduate, recorded his own arrangement of ‘Underneath the Harlem Moon’ (1932). Its opening choruses, before the band enters, consist of full-throttle solos by his star sidemen, Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and Rex Stewart on ...”