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“... Corona’ to her, and years later preached at her funeral. In 1609 she was remarried, to Sir John Danvers, a cultured and attractive gentleman half her age; the marriage was evidently a happy one, and George Herbert enjoyed a close relationship with his young stepfather. Walton depicts Magdalen as a helicopter parent, at least in the case of her eldest ...”

“... Auerbach’s, including Kermode’s ‘Introduction to the New Testament’ and his chapter on St John’s Gospel, and Alter’s Introduction to the Old Testament and his essay ‘The Characteristics of Hebrew Poetry’ – probably the best treatment of this difficult subject now available. Attention to conventions does not mean, however, that the majority ...”

“... and has brought me more particularly to consider the activities of a shadowy figure named Thomas Drury, who was closely involved in the business, but who has until now managed to evade the spotlight. His name has been known since the early 1970s, when a letter of his turned up in the manuscript-stacks of Lambeth Palace library, but who exactly he was, and ...”

“... Hermine; Fania Pascal, who taught him Russian in the 1930s; F.R. Leavis, the literary critic; John King, who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures and became a friend; M.O’C. Drury, a close friend over many years, who gives an unmatched account of Wittgenstein’s spiritual concerns; Rush Rhees, another close friend, who ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children were ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent Street to the Regent’s Park. The view south was to culminate in the Prince Regent’s Palace at Carlton House. Long before the work was ...”

“... as fundamentally collaborative. Chaucer’s work wouldn’t be the same without the patronage of John of Gaunt, or John Donne’s without Robert Drury. Given the sparseness of the documentation, it is particularly instructive to consider aspects of the creation of texts that are not what ...”

“... fact no alcohol. I told him how a few years previously I had hesitated outside the Theatre Royal Drury Lane after his show, wondering whether I should ask to see him. He said: ‘I was probably in my dressing-room asking: “Where are all my friends?” ’ John Lahr is not the first writer on Humphries to wonder how it is ...”

“... of the country. Riggs puts together Marlowe’s atheism and his spying to make of him (I quote John Gross) ‘the eternal rebel’; he reads the Tamburlaine plays, a wildly successful strip-cartoon in blank verse, as an engine of social criticism, and supposes that Marlowe’s death was personally procured by the queen, scandalised by his violation of ...”

“... to the liberating possibilities offered by the New World. An ode by William Havard, recited at Drury Lane in 1757, identifies Shakespeare as the Columbus of world drama, anticipating the installation, more than a century later, of statues of the playwright and the explorer opposite one another in Central Park, as two proto-founding fathers. The value of ...”

“... a touring Irish company, and she’d caught the eye of Thomas Coutts after she’d graduated to Drury Lane and was performing for Sheridan on £12 a week. They married after the death of his first wife (the mother of his daughters) in 1815, when she was 37 and he was 79. She was trounced as a predator and lampooned as a parvenue. Disraeli portrayed her as ...”

“... and establish himself as a writer of classical comedy for the prestigious Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. His grim comedy of manners, The Modern Husband, renounces the hastily written farces that made his name, and even seems to blame the audience for their haphazard style: ‘Hence, your nice Tastes he strove to entertain,/With unshap’d Monsters of a ...”

“... at the six volumes of Brian Vickers’s Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Bate shows that one John Potter had stoutly defended the play’s oddities many years earlier in the Theatrical Review. The real aficionados had always been enlightening and surprising in their championship of the Bard: what mattered in Hazlitt’s time, however, was a more general ...”