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“... imaginary woodlands, developing and expanding material from earlier lectures and essays. As Peter Holland’s eloquent afterword reminds us, Barton’s interest in the topic had first been excited by her reading of Ben Jonson’s Robin Hood play, The Sad Shepherd, for her monograph on Shakespeare’s great rival. Given this history, it may seem ...”

“... 1980s, when I was researching the commissioning and installation of the statue of Shakespeare by Peter Scheemakers in Westminster Abbey in 1741 as part of my doctorate, I discovered that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Ilya Budraitskis, James Butler, Andrew Cockburn, Meehan Crist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Peter Geoghegan, Jeremy Harding, Owen Hatherley, Abby Innes, Mimi Jiang, Thomas Jones, Laleh Khalili, Jackson Lears, Donald MacKenzie, Thomas Meaney, James Meek, Pankaj Mishra, Azadeh Moaveni, Jan-Werner Müller, Vadim Nikitin, Jacqueline Rose, Jeremy ...”

“... closest thing to a crisis in the public acceptance of Operation Desert Storm occurred when CNN’s Peter Arnett broke the rule against showing bodies, and transmitted images of Iraqi civilians killed by one of our smart bombs. Senator Simpson of Wyoming promptly labelled Arnett an Iraqi ‘sympathiser’. The criticism even extended to Ted Turner, who was ...”

“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... Giroux that the feelings in the poems ‘do not represent the feelings of an active homosexual’; Peter Levi that ‘homosexual love was to Elizabethans inevitably chaste.’ Pull the other one, Peter. No one watching Marlowe’s Edward II could have felt for one moment that the relationship between Edward and Gaveston was ...”

“... barren-spirited fellow … a property’. From this stems a still familiar, theatrical sense. Peter Quince, preparing the rude mechanicals’ show in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, says: ‘I will draw a bill of properties.’ Maus does not entirely ignore theatrical properties. She makes the shrewd point that there is often a tight fit between subject and ...”

“... moment, when a world dominated by classical poleis suddenly changed into a world dominated by Alexander and hellenistic kings. But in terms of style, a better comparison is with Demosthenes’ rival Aeschines, less bombastic, more varied in tone and equally deft in his use of comedic ventriloquies. But Cicero goes one step further than Aeschines by ...”

“... yet. She had no idea how to make it cosy. In the run-up to the Munich Agreement, the drama critic Alexander Woollcott wrote to Rebecca West that he had the ‘impression from a fairly faithful reading of Dorothy Thompson in the Herald Tribune that she may sail at any minute in order to strangle Neville Chamberlain’.After Hitler’s invasion of ...”

“... minister, had a famous relative, as did Petr Yakir, son of the military commander Iona Yakir, and Alexander Esenin-Volpin, son of the poet Sergei Esenin, whose suicide was one of the Moscow sensations of the 1920s. Mathematicians, including Volpin and Natan Sharansky, a Jewish former chess prodigy who would later become an important figure in Israeli ...”

“... baby’s father; whereupon it looks as though Florence did a deal with a man called Albert (Bud) Alexander, that by becoming Claire’s husband and the baby’s father, he also got a job for life. (Florence’s financial control over her daughter, Kraus notes with much perception, ‘was selective and punitive, as it often is in families of means’.) As ...”

“... of exile, a place where he could be a figure of swaggering talent and a marginal actor. Thus when Peter Hall saw MacGowran on stage in London in 1959 he knew immediately what MacGowran was made for on the English stage. He had, Hall decided, ‘the perfect qualities for a Shakespearean clown’ and he invited him to join the Royal Shakespeare Company to play ...”

“... Alexander Cockburn​ blamed Ian Fleming for the creation of the CIA. Without Fleming, Cockburn wrote on the fiftieth anniversary of the first James Bond novel, ‘the Cold War would have ended in the early 1960s. We would have had no Vietnam, no Nixon, no Reagan and no Star Wars.’ As adjutant to Britain’s chief of naval intelligence, Lieutenant Commander Fleming undertook a secret mission to Washington in May 1941 ...”

“... streets of the capital and triggered the violence of the June Days.The Düsseldorf artist Johann Peter Hasenclever captured such a moment in Workers before the City Council. Painted in 1849 and widely exhibited in a number of versions, it shows a delegation of labourers whose work-creation scheme – excavation work on the various arms of the Rhine – had ...”

“... Doubtless it was never quite so cut and dried. Skim the sub rosa lit of the time (Robin Cook, Alexander Baron, Colin MacInnes) and you’re plunged into a lost river with discrete but commingled tributaries: gay, criminal, East End Jewish, upper-class drop-out, lower-class dandy; the ‘morries’ of Cook’s dodgy Chelsea set, and Baron’s Harryboy ...”