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“... For Sir Thomas Browne it was a commonplace that ‘the number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live.’ But this is no longer necessarily true, as has been pointed out in these pages before now: there may be more people living now than all the people who have ever died. With over 5.4 billion of us alive today, on course to become 8 ...”

“... examined the child, claimed to have detected promise of mathematical genius. Moving on to King Edward VI Grammar School in Aston, Reed specialised in Classics. Since Greek was not taught, he taught himself, and went on to win the Temperley Latin prize and a scholarship to Birmingham University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his Birmingham ...”

“... by authorial complaints against Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes and the Estate (e.g. David Holbrook, Edward Butscher) or have come to nothing (e.g. Lois Ames, Harriet Rosenstein). Most of the book-length literary criticism is unimpressive. There isn’t much to choose, for example, between Margaret Dickie Uroff (‘As they developed, Plath came to locate herself ...”

“... Bruno Schulz was not Dante. Nor was he another Kafka (a writer whom he greatly admired). No Thomas Aquinas stood behind Schulz’s infernos and glimpses of paradise; nor is there in his work any notion of an inaccessible Law of the kind Kafka invoked with unappeasable irony. What Schulz did share with Kafka was a Father Problem. His father, like ...”

“... eldritch folksy pop music transfers to Australia in a welter of guitars, penny-whistles, Tam Lin, Thomas the Rhymer, drugs, inspiration and greed. All this casts a spell on the escapist Richard Miller. Darcy, spokesman for an alternative theology, had learnt that there were ‘two people inside me: one who was weak and sentimental; the other somebody who ...”

“... career as designer and manufacturer. There are more than seventy previously unpublished letters to Thomas Wardle, manager of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co, which prove exhaustively how careful he was about the dyeing and printing of their fabrics and to what lengths he went to get the colours right. He liked nothing better than putting on smock and ...”

“... although she used to talk in later life about what a strange lottery marriage was. What was Thomas Carlyle’s figure of romance? One thing that can be said for the Romantic poets is that they were not snobs: their images of love were of violets by mossy stones rather than grand society hostesses. Carlyle looks forward to the style of romance familiar ...”

“... hands of a Popish Malignant Company.’ At Putney in the winter of 1647, Cromwell had repudiated Thomas Harrison’s demand that the king be put on trial. But whatever its motivation – and there is no need to fasten on any single motive – the eventual execution enabled Cromwell and Ireton to stamp out the movement for democracy in the army and to ...”

“... of English border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Surrey, who cut off the Scottish army’s route north, forcing it to move to Branxton Hill, where its cannon ...”

“... from the one Hourani had learnt at Oxford’, he might have explored the association further. Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place, sheds more light on the powerful mind and personality of Malik: ebullient, erudite and eloquent, he seems to have acted as a kind of tutor-cum-father-figure at one stage of Said’s career. A friend of both Kennedy and ...”

“... life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted Member of Parliament, as his first biographer Edward Thompson described him in 1776, the year of James Barry’s engraving. Andrew Marvell, whose father was an Anglican clergyman, was born in the East Riding of Yorkshire in 1621, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1633 at the age of 12. He left ...”

“... who, in 1870, already suspected that their new town might fare better if named Upton Royal. Thomas Hardy is hoisted aboard and driven past Weymouth to the Isle of Portland, a rocky place where Marie Stopes was once to be found retired among stoneworkers still accustomed to testing the fertility of potential brides before finally consenting to marry ...”

“... killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s trial on 5 March, the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, asserted that ‘the story of Henry IV being set forth in a play, and in that play there being set forth the killing of the King upon the stage’, Meyrick and his fellows had had ‘the play of Henry IV’ performed. Finally, a Government ...”

“... novel and fifth book; her first books had been biographies, of her father’s famous family and of Edward Burne-Jones. She was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and the mother of three grown-up children, and although no longer in straits as desperate as those she had drawn on for the novel, she was accustomed to making do on very little. She lived on the ...”

“... the great champion of New York, in the old cemetery of Trinity Church near the WTC. While Thomas Jefferson waxed pastoral about an agrarian America, Hamilton insisted on the cosmopolitanism of the city as the wellspring of the nation. To see his grave buried again was difficult, but the rubble will be removed. So come delight in the city again, swap ...”