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“... the contents of Mitford’s parcel were emptied out onto the table, the collector – one Thomas James Wise – recognised the momentous find and bought all dozen copies.So the story went, at any rate. But the entire tale – sausages and all – was made up by Wise. In reality the book didn’t exist before 1893, when Wise himself had forged it, concocting ...”

“... written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of ...”

“... the contemporary Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle through James Kelman. At stake in Longman’s ‘British’ rebranding of Norton’s ‘English’ title is more than the pedantry that Ricks dismisses with the observation that ‘people do not as yet say that they love or study British literature’. (The Longman may ...”

“... are venial. And so we have the statement that Claverhouse was defeated at Killiecrankie, that James V died in a Border skirmish, that before 1707 Glasgow merchants had taken over the tobacco trade, that the 18th-century Highlanders were Catholics. There is also a confusion between the Covenant and the Act of Union, which would not have been committed in ...”

“... lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English ...”

“... Independence, to its rise in the Revolution. Both Melville’s grandfathers, Thomas Melvill and Peter Gansevoort, were Revolutionary heroes – Thomas for being among the Sons of Liberty who defied the colonial tax-gatherers in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, Peter for withstanding a British siege in 1777 (after which he ...”

“... fear, but supplies little by way of evidence of its ultimate cause, and draws no conclusions. Peter Ackroyd, however, is firmly of the Truffaut school. His Hitchcock trembles from the outset: ‘Fear fell upon him in early life.’ At the age of four (or 11, or …), his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that ...”

“... How can we know Samuel Johnson without summoning him through the reanimating power of James Boswell’s Life? For the many scholars, writers, readers and collectors who call themselves Johnsonians, this is the near impossible task. Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas ...”

“... Handel’s Xerxes begins with a famous largo, ‘Shade as it never was’ (Ombra mai fu), sung by the self-same King of Kings to his beloved: a plane tree. Aelian, a collector of amazing historical facts, provides the fullest account of this bizarre episode: That Xerxes fellow was a clown … he was slavishly devoted to a plane tree, as if the tree was something to be wondered at ...”

“... their language, distorted how they looked at the world and at themselves. Yet, as both Judd and Peter Marshall demonstrate, neither Parliament nor the public ever gave Empire much conscious and sustained attention except when things were going hideously wrong and/or when they themselves were directly involved. Thus there were English colonies in America ...”

“... they’d all be older.’Time may be elastic, but place is less flexible. Unlike Jason Bourne or James Bond – the novels point out the contrast more than once, though as it happens there are similarities, too, not least in the Bourne movies’ portrayal of a secret service consuming itself – Herron’s characters don’t get to travel much. In Spook ...”

“... All these will be gathered, sorted and reclothed in flesh. Jacopus da Voragine imagines the martyr James the Dismembered sweetly apostrophising his body as he is tortured: ‘Go third toe, to thy companions, and as the grain of wheat bears much fruit, so shalt thou rest with thy fellows unto the last day ... Be comforted, little toe, because great and small ...”

“... new publications from the States: Mailer, His Life and Times, by (that means ‘transcribed by’) Peter Manso, and Conversations with Capote by (can this be the correct spelling?) Lawrence Grobel.1 Each book goes far, and unpleasantly, beyond mere feet-kissing, and each offers a neat image of the sort of literary-critical milieu in which the Mailers and ...”

“... exchange is between Rhiannon and Gwen, wife of Malcolm, who was once in love with Rhiannon though Peter was much more so, so much so that she had to have an abortion in consequence. The two are talking in Gwen’s kitchen, where ‘with a small start Rhiannon noticed that the bottle of white wine on the table in front of her was not the same as the one they ...”

“... but only in passing, and only because of the fascination with it of such Hollywood stars as James Dean and Steve McQueen. Racing appears the most absurd outgrowth of our fascination with the car: drivers hurtle around in circles, at the limits of adhesion. Some lose control and end up dead, mutilated or crippled. And yet it’s one of the most ...”