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“... a volume written as an exercise in academic sociology. This was Art Students Observed (1973), by Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, part of Faber’s Society Today and Tomorrow series. The authors’ research was funded by the Social Science Research Council. One suspects that Madge took the leading role in the book, not only because of seniority but ...”

“... Next Millennium, much the more substantial of the books, contains the text of five out of the six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures which Calvino was to have delivered at Harvard. It was published in Italy in 1988, but for some reason the translation has taken a while to reach us. Calvino’s headings are ...”

“... in 1591. He spots that it includes a presentation to the Queen by ‘Auberon (Oberon) the fairie King’, and duly writes to Malone to tell him all about it. ‘I leave the inferences, if any, to you.’ Sure enough, the content of Warton’s letter turns up (unacknowledged) in Malone’s essay on the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays in his hugely ...”

“... didn’t see the real Los Angeles until 1965. But to him the city was a myth as powerful as King Arthur. ‘I rented a car at the airport and drove down the length of Sunset in time to see the sun sink into the Pacific … I spent my time driving aimlessly around the freeways. It was concrete over sand. The anguish of lost souls … The people had lost ...”

“... gave rise to a sense of a much broader Phoenician Mediterranean. Melqart, whose name means ‘king of the city’, is said to have been introduced to Tyre in the tenth century bc, but his cult spread widely. Like Hercules, with whom he was later identified, he was a wandering hero, credited with founding many cities. If the tophet cult divides, Melqart ...”

“... end of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King John (somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: ‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’ I used to recite it (in my day children were called on to torture visitors in this way), but while I enjoyed the rhythm and the pace, it ...”

“... the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to sing ...”

“... generally. Cabantous touches on the excesses of English Restoration libertines like Sir Charles Sedley and on the slightly earlier and more philosophical French examples, notably Théophile de Viau. Atheists were of course blasphemers by definition, and we know from the charges against Christopher Marlowe that, like Théophile, they sometimes larded ...”

“... know-all. August Vanags was unworthy of being the author of his own book. Put him on Larry King, and he’d unsell Boy 381 at the rate of thousands a minute. So instead they packed him off to Whidbey Island with an ex-directory phone number and refused all interviews on his behalf. And with good reason, since even Lucy – though perhaps there’s no ...”

“... some prayers of unsettled authorship, a dramatisation of part of Samuel Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison, admittedly of little interest in itself, and some poems of which the same might be said. The 100-page introduction is lovingly minute in its coverage of early commentary, and the annotations are careful and useful. The performances of the other ...”

“... gift. He was given a minor position in the elaborate hierarchy of servants who supplied the king with his every need. Later on he married a woman who was reputed to be a soft-skinned beauty, and the couple had a number of children, most of them hairy like their father. Among the hirsute offspring were three girls: Maddalena, Francesca and Antonietta. As ...”

“... of its sort in English – means we know the 15th-century Pastons better than we know any medieval king or queen. The letters, first published in 1787, revealed a family on the make. Clement Paston, a yeoman farmer born at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister ...”

“... The Song of Songs at Paris’s Théâtre des Arts: The opening scene, presenting the meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was decorated in purple, the score was of C-major chords and the perfume was incense. Later scenes matched yellow with the scent of hyacinths, green with lily, and so on. The poet Paul Fort remembered that ‘the projections ...”

“... English satire; on Swift, Pope and Prior, as well as a host of lesser-known figures, including Charles Cotton, Tom Brown and William King. Among the most conspicuous features of early 18th-century Menippean satire was the cod scholarly apparatus. Mandeville’s generically unstable Fable, with its core tale written in ...”