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“... book would have been unputdownable. He corresponded extensively with Pope and Richardson. He gave John Gay a job on his periodical The British Apollo when the future Scriblerian was newly arrived in London from Devon, and was an early and influential advocate of the Scottish poets Mallett and Thomson (the bardic conception of the poet’s role elaborated in ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... and finding one’s balance, and then wondering if one has really grasped the thing after all. John Donne’s poems in particular are extremely unstable. Critics have often got into a sweat about the way that they argue implausible cases, and very often, too, things happen in the course of them which make it quite clear that while the speaker is busily ...”

“... first, Dora, dying suddenly at the age of eight months. Only a fortnight before that his father, John Dickens, had died after enduring a horrifying surgical operation (while his son looked on) without the benefit of anesthesia. His wife suffered for some time from a ‘nervous’ condition, perhaps post-natal depression, or perhaps simply exhaustion. In 1851 ...”

“... series of highlights (Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1842-46), they were savaged by John Wilson Croker in the Tory Quarterly Review. Hatchet jobs were Croker’s speciality: it was his review of Endymion that Byron joked was the cause of Keats’s death in Don Juan (‘’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be ...”

“... really launches his narrative is that of James Hadfield, who on 15 May 1800 was arrested in the Drury Lane Theatre after firing a pistol at George III as he was blowing a kiss to his subjects from the royal box. There was no question that Hadfield had acted with deadly intent. He had loaded his pistols carefully and aimed like the ex-soldier he was; his ...”

“... called Vortigern and Rowena. This was eventually performed before a sceptical audience at Drury Lane. Ireland’s play has the typical features of pastiche. His characters always sound like Shakespeare, and usually like Shakespeare’s biggest characters. When Queen Edmunda goes mad she sounds at first like Lear ripping off his vile lendings (‘And ...”

“... Enfields, relics of some forgotten tableau or drama, were discovered among the stage properties at Drury Lane.’ And where did Captain Mainwaring’s men obtain their first serious weapons? Why, from the Peabody Museum of Historic Army Weapons, whose zealous caretaker had first to be outwitted. In the great flap of 1940 the improvisation of infernal devices ...”

“... with a youthful Thomas Betterton, aged 25, celebrated in the title role at the Phoenix in Drury Lane. In fact Pericles was more than simply popular: the play became a byword for audience appeal and recognition. In The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl (c.1613-14), Robert Taylor speculates, ‘And if [this play] prove so happy as to please,/We’ll say ’tis ...”

“... The relationship between Byron and his editor John Murray lasted a little over ten years. It began in March 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made Byron’s name. (‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he famously wrote, or is said to have written.) It ended twice: first, in the winter of 1822, when, after a number of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron transferred his business to the publisher John Hunt; and finally in the spring of 1824, when Murray presided over the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, which he had not read, in his rooms at 50 Albemarle Street ...”

“... that included her aunt, Sarah Siddons, her father, Charles, and her uncle, the great tragedian John Philip Kemble, Fanny herself was deeply ambivalent towards the theatre. She first aspired to be a writer rather than an actress; and it was only when the family faced bankruptcy that the latest Kemble was swiftly prepared for the stage. As the manager and ...”

“... Opera or The School for Scandal from this reckoning. The tone is likewise snooty towards John Rich: we must hope that the fuller knowledge of Covent Garden practice which is beginning to emerge will permit less condescending treatment. It should be said that Nicoll is good, though brief, on Garrick as director, at a time when London companies ...”

“... to be small, ugly, ignorant and coarse. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge had known her before she met John Hatfield, a bigamist who tricked her into a fraudulent marriage, and both men were united in their venomous hatred of her seducer. Yet Hatfield, whose exploits eventually brought him to the gallows, was, as Bragg shows, one of the popular heroes of the ...”

“... Llandaff. The secret of his puzzling resignation probably lies in a story told in the memoirs of John Addington Symonds, a pupil at Harrow at that time, which were not published till the 1960s. There, a simple tale of blackmail is revealed. For all Vaughan’s intense sermonising on the evils of homosexuality (in one purple passage he referred to a pederast ...”

“... Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of fortune, seductions, conspiracies, keep the fingers flicking over the pages. Dead on cue, after some cunningly weighted rhetorical passage, a jibe at ‘Pretty ...”