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“... inspired the grim panacea advanced in 1698 by the cosmopolitan, freethinking laird Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Confronting the problem of mass evictions and vagrancy brought about by the famine, Fletcher recommended the establishment of the form of slavery found in antiquity as a means of relieving the poor and ...”

“... possess a kind of social realism absent from the work of Webster, Ford, Massinger, or Beaumont and Fletcher. In their treatment of social mobility and ambition, women and marriage, and in their ethical and religious overtones, they reflect the values of the City and Country as opposed to the Court party. Puritanism and Theatre has been published as a volume in ...”

“... The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2015), which was published with blurbs from Elton John, Noam Chomsky, Piers Morgan and Stephen Fry, not exactly a ready-made support group. It has a chapter on Anslinger and Holiday. Hari suggests that the kind of argument I have quoted from the file was an aside – though it sounds to me rather more like an ...”

“... as an idyllic apogee of national self-definition. By the time Shakespeare and his apprentice John Fletcher co-wrote All Is True (printed as Henry VIII) in 1613, wistfulness for the previous reign was already growing, despite what the playwrights and others may have recalled about Tudor rule: agricultural depression, enclosure, the plague, the poor ...”

“... title is presumably a market pitch. The subtitle, perhaps another pitch, lays bare a problem which John Stubbs never grips. We are two-thirds of the way through before we reach ‘the English civil war’ of the 1640s. The bulk of the book is set in the generation before it, from the years around the accession of Charles I to the outbreak of fighting in ...”

“... family, after the takeover of the firm by Smith, Elder & Co (itself soon to be taken over by John Murray). A descendant – loyally named Richard Bentley – had lovingly conserved and catalogued them for posterity. In 1967, the BL acquired a tranche of early Macmillan papers: Harold Macmillan, it seems, was keen that the family firm’s archive should ...”

“... row of books that try to say what the term meant and means. To this shelf one is happy to add Ian Fletcher’s collection of essays. It is London-based, so I hope it will not sound parochial to call it much the best of the books under review. Fletcher, by now I suppose the doyen of Nineties studies, contributes a valuable ...”

“... the Scottish science of man is embedded deep in institutions. Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have become tutelar deities of campus and think-tank, the respected grandfathers of the social sciences and patron saints of the policy wonk. Yet, for all this familiarity, the otherness of the Scottish Enlightenment tends to elude us. Adam Ferguson ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... thinking of taking acting lessons. Perhaps he had been inspired by the careers of Jimmy Boyle, John McVicar, ‘Dirty Den’ of EastEnders, and Paul Barber, one of the ‘Brothers McGregor’ who also spent some time inside, and who recently claimed in the Sun: ‘Jailed turned me into a star.’ Burglary, theft, blackmail, arson, extortion, violence ...”

“... by Byron, who used to turn negligently at dinner parties to his inscrutable servant and demand, ‘Fletcher, how far did I swim the other day?’ – always receiving a reassuring reply: ‘Ten miles, my lord,’ or ‘fifteen miles.’ One of the nice things about Byron was his lack of self-assurance. Trelawney, who sneered behind his back at the club ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... 1581 was the young dramatist. The major new fact with which Honigmann backs up the theory is that John Cottom, who was for a time a schoolmaster at Stratford, appears in the same will. Both Hoghton and the schoolmaster were Catholics; and there is evidence that Shakespeare’s father was a recusant. These factors would help to explain why Shakespeare might ...”

“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”

“... without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes ...”