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“... he moved to France with his wife and their infant daughter, Laura.Paris was where Mathews met John Ashbery, then a Fulbright Scholar. It was 1956. Ashbery introduced him to the work of the eccentric procedural writer Raymond Roussel, which reignited Mathews’s literary imagination. In 1959 he came into some money and used it to found a little magazine ...”

“... inarticulate. While she was still an undergraduate, Barbara Pym went to Stratford to see Romeo and Juliet, and ‘it was all terribly tragic – both Romeo and Juliet were intensely passionate, especially Romeo.’ For ten years after this, the journals are the record of an ‘intensely passionate’ and perhaps even ...”

“... Harper.The relationship began to break down in the 1990s. In 1992 Ken Clarke, home secretary under John Major, announced an ambitious plan to reform policing. He described the police to Harper as ‘the last great unreformed Victorian public service’: excessively bureaucratic (the Met most of all, with five senior ranks of officer rather than the usual ...”

“... between Britain and France that had been forced on her by the Napoleonic years. The heroine, Juliet Granville, is on the run from a commissar of Robespierre’s secret police, who has forced her to marry him for the sake of her inheritance. Yet the England to which she flees is a place of fear and sometimes Gothic danger. To get her man, Albert, she must ...”

“... their star comic Will Kempe, and their player-poet Shakespeare turning out such hits as Romeo and Juliet, Richard III and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But 1596 would prove a difficult year: for Shakespeare it was a year of personal tragedy (the death of his son Hamnet at the age of 11) and for the whole company a time of professional setbacks, including the ...”

“... were Richard III and Richard II, each of which went through five editions before 1616. Romeo and Juliet went through four; Hamlet appeared in three. For readers since the 18th century, the narrative poems have been at best marginal to the Shakespeare canon. The sonnets, on the other hand, which were the least known of his non-dramatic poems until the end of ...”

“... born towards the end of the century’. And while he’s very good on the Hampshire history – John Tyndall, Tennyson, Allen’s radical fiction – it doesn’t tell us much about Thompson. The fact that Austen’s Chawton was ‘just twenty miles away’ hardly seems impressive – it’s unlikely Thompson thought that was a short distance; she certainly ...”

“... The book’s contributors touch on common themes. We learn a great deal from archaeo-zoologist Juliet Clutton-Brock, for example, about the significance of animal domestication ten thousand years ago, about the ‘resemblance between the husbanding of livestock and the keeping of slaves’ and about property, profit and ‘the control of subordinate ...”

“... began to follow the first GCSE courses under the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the teaching profession by announcing an immediate review of the Statutory Order for English. No sooner had the review been announced than Mr Patten and his fellow ministers did their best to pre-empt its outcome. They let it be known that ...”

“... La mimica degli antichi (1832)... to the more casual observations of foreign travellers like John Evelyn, who recorded at least one insulting gesture (biting the finger) which the two lexicographers missed. In the second place, Italian judicial archives often note the gestures of insult leading to cases of assault and battery, and (among other ...”

“... recover the hidden sentiments I had almost lost within myself.’ Neruda was translating Romeo and Juliet into Spanish at more or less the same time as he was writing Memoirs. ‘I was always quick to forget,’ he writes in a poem in Isla Negra; this is not a refutation of the great ‘sonata’ from Residencia – ‘No hay olvido’ (‘There’s No ...”

“... was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the reader who is reading ...”

“... women, she has lived a large part of her life (her fortunes fluctuate wildly). Both Mark Rees and Juliet Jacques, the author of the 2015 memoir, Trans, fall in and out of the dole queue. Even before the trial, Ashley’s career as one of the UK’s most successful models had been brought to an abrupt end when she was outed by the press. Up to that point, like ...”

“... regaled.’ A life history in which the stomach is wholly absent – you would never know whether John Stuart Mill ever yearned for sweets or felt his tummy rumble – doesn’t seem quite human. It is only in the past decade or so, however (M.F.K. Fisher and Alice B. Toklas notwithstanding), that food has been making the transition from supporting role to ...”

“... and works impressed him: Honegger’s Pacific 231, Ravel’s The Child and the Enchanted Objects, John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers. He felt he could outmodernise them, but misfired with his opera The Fiery Angel, which concerns demonic possession in Renaissance Cologne. Between the first and second drafts, it became the noisiest opera ever written ...”