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“... a hammer, a clown or mummer, an informer and a peasant. Jack Sheppard, ‘picaresque superstar of English highwaymen’, who after escaping prison strolled around in fancy clothes as if to defy the authorities, was celebrated in ballads, songs and popular biographies. The spectral bogeyman known as ‘Spring-Heeled Jack’, clad in helmet and body suit, who ...”

“... Beano, the Dandy, Scotland’s Sunday Post) and the Protestant Truth Society. The printer Richard Pynson worked from here; the black-letter colophon to his A ful deuout and gostely treatyse of the imytacion and folowynge the blessed lyfe of oure moste mercyfull sauyoure cryste (1517) declares: ‘This boke Inprinted at London in Fletestrete at the ...”

“... not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts. Yet both were writing with the special excitement of socialist voyeurs. Determined to expose the secrets of Whitehall ...”

“... member of a big, effective clan bears out pretty well the sense implicit in her lightning sketch. Richard Perceval is the son of John, Robert’s youngest brother, who was also snubbed, patronised and cold-shouldered. Richard Perceval has written excellent studies, admirably researched, of A.E. Housman and of the Powys ...”

“... Duke of Norfolk existed to make sure that everyone performed their ritual to his satisfaction; no Richard Dimbleby existed to ‘sell’ the royal performances to the public. This would not have been an easy task, for the performers missed their cues, arrived drunk, took the wrong places and, in some cases, giggled throughout the ceremony – George IV’s ...”

“... The title of Tao Lin’s sixth book and second novel is an act of mild provocation. Richard Yates belongs to a biography, not a novel – certainly not one in which Yates himself doesn’t appear. One character in the book steals a copy of The Easter Parade; another reads Disturbing the Peace; a third tells an anecdote about a reading Yates once gave ...”

“... you could drink coffee and smoke the clay pipes kindly provided by the establishment. Unlike their English counterparts, Hamburg’s coffee houses admitted women, so there was female company to be had too. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that many of the foreigners passing through Germany’s largest seaport gravitated towards Dreyer’s, hoping to ease ...”

“... a Mistress Greffine or Griffin, and among its frequent guests was a Stratford businessman called Richard Quiney. From here, on 25 October 1598, Quiney wrote a short letter addressed on the verso ‘To my Loveinge good ffrend & contreymann Mr Wm Shackespere’ – the only item of Shakespeare’s correspondence to survive. It is a request for a loan of ...”

“... as the landmass of Europe and Asia is that by so doing one may avoid all direct contact with the English literary establishment, which I have nonetheless managed to enter with the publication of a novel called Wales’ Work.1 In Paris, where I have lived even longer than Graham Greene, avoiding literature is not on. Whether he chooses to or not, the Parisian ...”

“... Heu michi quia sterilem duxi vitam iuvenilem. But her view is one of the great, long-lasting English fallacies, a fine example of post hoc propter hoc. Because for many centuries sharp-witted boys (but not girls) were picked out and taught Latin, it was observed that sharp-wittedness and Latin went together, and concluded that learning Latin made you ...”

“... discovered in his neo-Freudian Young Man Luther. Heiko Oberman, in the best of recent studies in English, called Luther Man between God and the Devil. Richard Marius will have had Oberman’s title in mind when he chose to call his own Luther book The Christian between God and Death. The notion that Luther was so afraid of ...”

“... very much older before I gathered that there was something not quite right about T.E. Lawrence. Richard Aldington’s Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry, which came out in 1955, denounced its subject as a bastard (literally), a liar, a charlatan and a pervert. It also disparaged the importance and the achievements of the Arab revolt, mocked ...”

“... artist engraved it, a rare republican icon that celebrates the transplantation of radical English political ideology to the American shore. The engraving is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the ...”

“... Can it be doubted that to write about ‘the English Spirit’ (or L’Ame Française or ‘the Spanish Soul’) is intellectually disreputable? Plainly, there are no such entities, nor does anyone at heart believe there are. The motives for invoking them are various: vote-getting is one; also the need to find something to say at a school speech-day ...”

“... out to unpack. They refer to him simply as ‘the favourite’. It is one of the paradoxes of the English Renaissance that this golden age of English favouritism, which saw the likes of Leicester, Essex, Somerset and Buckingham enjoying periods of apparently unquestionable authority, was also the golden age of ...”