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“... The great ocean liners were the landmarks, grace notes and sometimes the agents of history. Born as I was in the Belle Epoque, admittedly in its dying days, I was well placed to marvel at the mightiest moveable artefacts of that time: the ‘floating cities’ of Cunard’s four-funnelled, five-syllabled fleet, Lusitania, Aquitania and Mauretania. They were the civil equivalent of dreadnoughts and they competed with an aggressive Germany for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic, a non-existent but highly cherishable award for the fastest crossing, which the Lusitania snatched from the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907 ...”

“... unthinking, vengeful behaviour on the ground. Two cases stand out: those of Myra Hindley and Sarah Payne. In both public fury has prevailed over fairness, the interests of the bereaved over those of the community as a whole. In 1966, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady were convicted of the murder of two children whom they had abducted and tortured. They received ...”

“... criticism or even ridicule’, Riccardo Steiner wonders why Jones did not float the name of Sylvia Payne, a medical doctor and distinguished member of the Middle Group, as a possible alternative. Steiner’s transcription, however, contains an important error, for, as the original in the Klein Archives in the Wellcome Institute shows, Jones actually wrote ...”

“... and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a ...”

“... and Seven Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, partly reconstructed and partly fabricated by John Payne Collier in 1856. The book that was readily available, and which did exert enormous influence in the 19th century, was Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. Now the situation is reversed: R.A. Foakes has produced as full a reconstruction of ...”

“... But all that has nothing whatever to do with this book.Although it appears in a series (edited by Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe himself) in which the titles suggest all the latest Marxist, Feminist and Structuralist Paris fashions, the actual contents of this exercise, where they are comprehensible, seem to me to be distinctly old hat. Most of the essays ...”

“... a lapidary eloquence. Here’s William Tildesley, a 17th-century diarist: ‘June 15, In great payne; June 16, In paines alover; June 17, In great payne.’ And such mute ness may help to explain why many codes of conduct – Stoicism is the obvious example – have prescribed dignified silence as an assertion of brain ...”

“... As I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare on the train there was a woman sitting near me doing a deal on the phone. She was getting agitated. ‘But I have to transfer the money to Mr Shakespeare himself,’ she said. ‘No … Listen, I really need to speak to Mr Shakespeare. Can you put me through? Hello? … Hello?’ Then the line went dead ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... heart of the British Public. It is clear that Damilola Taylor is no Princess Diana or Sarah Payne. I stop to read some of the messages with the flowers. Nearly all seem to be from people who live in and around Peckham: church groups and individuals keen to stress their ties with the place (‘I’ve lived here for thirty years,’ one of them ...”

“... experimenting with the ottava rima form: So hangith in balaunce Off war my pes, reward of all my payne At Mountzon thus I restles rest in spayne. Instead of gold the king, whose natural suspiciousness was mutating into paranoia, sent Edmund Bonner, ostensibly to help but in fact to spy on Wyatt. Bonner’s letters, addressed to Thomas Cromwell, make ...”

“... the care of a man who knows that he may be close to writing his own last words: to hear that poor Payne my water [man] hath buried a child and is dying himself – to hear that a labourer I sent but the other day to Dagenhams to know how they did there is dead of the plague . . . to hear that Mr Lewes hath another daughter sick – and lastly, that both my ...”

“... fellow sideman Robert Baheire, the churchwardens Thomas Holmes and Edward Ley, and the minister Stephen Egerton. Laoutaris has also established the exact location of Field’s printing shop, in a property called (after its former monastic use) the Timber House. This lay off the western end of Carter Lane, abutting onto the back of Elizabeth Russell’s ...”

“... symptoms is recapitulated or mimicked by Eliot in another account of creative reading. A letter to Stephen Spender on this topic has, since its publication in 1966, become famous: ‘Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten ...”

“... Quite simply it caused nearly all of the 72 deaths. ‘There’s a moment,’ the fire expert Stephen Mackenzie told me, ‘when the tactics have to move from “remain in place” to “assisted evacuation”.’ It had been obvious from very early on, even to spectators on the ground, that the fire at Grenfell Tower was not going to be put out, that it ...”