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“... Helena Jane and me pack’d in the Family Coach, with Mary Lawless, Mary Smith, Blanchois, and William in another carriage, driving full speed, nine Irish Adventurers, to the French dominions.’ Two at least of these Irish adventurers were as ready as William Wordsworth had been a decade earlier to feel what bliss it ...”

“... pleased with themselves, so convinced that they represented sensibility in its highest form. Then William was always stealing Sam’s ideas and appropriating his contacts, with a never-failing air of disinterested benevolence, and in the sacred name of friendship. Robert Southey, Sam’s great friend, Sara’s brother-in-law, another promising young man in ...”

“... totally foreign to their day to day lives’. Venice-on-Thames. The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the river offered food and music, as well as bear-baiting, to more unruly customers. But the observant would have noticed something rather ...”

“... Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of bed in high Archimedean excitement when the name entered his head. The public first heard of Metroland in 1915, when the railway used it in a penny ...”

“... J.M. Dent to illustrate a two-volume edition of Le Morte d’Arthur, conceived in the style of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, enabled Beardsley to give up his deadly day job as an office clerk, only to find the quest for the Holy Grail almost as constraining. The endless knights and ladies bored him; something odder and darker was emerging from the ...”

“... company was spun off from the Man Group, which sponsors the Man Booker Prize, in 2007. James Man was a sugar cooper and broker who in 1784 won the contract to supply the Royal Navy with rum; then the firm moved from sugar and rum into other commodities, then into futures contracts, then into derivatives more generally, then into financial ...”

“... parallel might be the non-guilty verdict returned for the seven bishops who had refused to read James II’s Declaration of Indulgence for Catholics and Protestant dissenters in 1687, a refutation of royal authority which paved the way for William of Orange’s invasion and the Glorious Revolution.) Yet I have become ...”

“... Acropolis by the Venetians in 1687 is illustrated in Francesco Fanelli’s Atene Attica (1707); James Stuart and Nicholas Revett describe the dilapidated state of the temple in their Antiquities of Athens (1787); and William Gell captures in watercolour the removal of sculptures by Lord Elgin’s agents in 1801. Alongside ...”

“... the novel, we should recall that the Anglican Church was widely Calvinist under Elizabeth and James. Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not so far as I know the consequence of a revolution, echoes on into 18th-century fiction, while the great European picaresque novel with its powerfully developed religious strain was, in the hands of the Spaniard Aleman and the ...”

“... his would-be resurrectors. The same melancholy afflicts his most authoritative modern biographer, James Anderson Winn: ‘Any candid teacher of English literature must admit that many students find little pleasure or stimulation in those few selections from Dryden we now ask them to read.’ The difficulty is not confined to students, or to recent times. ‘I ...”

“... and cheerful slaves – was ‘in sheer readability, surpassed by nothing in American fiction’. William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! – with its gallery of ruthless parvenus and race-fixated slavers – featured ‘one of the most complex, unreadable and uncommunicative prose styles ever to find its way into print’. It soon found its way out ...”

“... Likenesses at the Royal West of England Academy. Many poets and writers are in the exhibition: William Empson, Seamus Heaney, Charles Tomlinson, Salman Rushdie, Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill. The only other bare feet besides Walcott’s belong to a corpse on a dissecting table in front of Keith Simpson, the forensic pathologist. An illegible name-tag is ...”

“... in the OED, and so offers the hope that I might have made it up – though, alas, I discover that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, used it to describe an addiction to technology. Ah well, my usage is etymologically purer because it preserves the sense of the Greek root -laliá, meaning ‘chatter’. Shakespeare was a playwright, a word forged with ...”

“... the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’, from 1968. Or, with his and your permission, ‘I have sailed the seas and come … to G … a healthcare mecca and football burg that was previously a town with a ...”

“... insanity in an English courtroom, but the case that 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 ...”