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“... won seven world titles, an achievement equalled only by the game’s dominant player in the 1990s, Stephen Hendry. He has made more century breaks – at the time of writing, 1240 – and more 147s (the maximum score you can get in a single frame) in tournament play than anyone else. O’Sullivan was given the nickname ‘Rocket’ early on, because of his ...”

“... as we know both from later memoirs about the passing on of the title role from Burbage to Joseph Taylor and from records of performances in the 1630s for Charles I’s court. Even after London’s playhouses were closed by the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, an anonymous adaptor produced a truncated version suitable for surreptitious performance at fairs and ...”

“... so-called Chandos portrait as an image of Shakespeare painted by a friend and fellow actor, John Taylor. Donated to the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, the Chandos is the only candidate to have been granted much credence, but new ones continue to surface, most recently the Cobbe Portrait, which formed the centrepiece of the evocatively titled Shakespeare ...”

“... films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the carpet ...”

“... opium routinely, to sedate themselves and their children. For the more exotic figure of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, addiction started while he was at the great university standing on the edge of the sad East Anglian plain. The Trojan horse in Coleridge’s case was his teeth, which ached relentlessly. A certain sympathy must extend to him, since dentistry was ...”

“... views is also misleading. In a powerful and ingenious essay entitled ‘Invisible Bullets’, Stephen Greenblatt shows that even an idea as apparently subversive as the ‘atheism’ of the Renaissance – the Machiavellian notion that religion was an instrument of political domination – could serve the English state overseas. Thomas Harriot, a ...”

“... malevolent recluses. Things began to change with the arrival of a new lord chief justice, Lord Taylor of Gosforth, and the appointment to the bench of intelligent and progressive voices like those of Harry Woolf, Thomas Bingham and Stephen Sedley. By the mid-1990s, the senior judiciary were conducting a spirited campaign ...”

“... age begun to feel that his facility undid him. ‘Thomas’s poetry is turned on like a tap,’ Stephen Spender wrote, and Thomas feared as much. ‘It is just poetic stuff,’ Spender said, ‘with no beginning or end, shape, or intelligent and intelligible control.’ Incontinence was not supposed to be a mark of talent; and Thomas couldn’t help being ...”

“... almost as though it were a simple matter of logic. Writing in this paper some months ago, Stephen Sedley considered the off-the-shelf solution of incorporation of the European Convention’ to head the list of possible reforms in this area ‘if only on the practical ground that adherence to a set of standards enforceable on the state by an ...”

“... a marina fit for Abramovich and his cohorts. Or, more modestly, for Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on their pleasure craft, the Kalizma. Sadly, that vision was premature. The proposed harbour for the Have-Yachts would have to wait. And move upstream.My somewhat distressed 1993 map had a magnificent but provisional set of dotted lines running down ...”

“... of its director in Life, led to an invitation to work for John Huston. He wrote an adaptation of Stephen Crane’s story ‘The Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of ...”

“... this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who looks not long out of school himself, polishes off the whole sequence in a couple of hours. 10 May. Filling a pot with water to take a huge bunch of peonies L. has sent for my birthday I slip on the wet flags and fall down three or four of the stone ...”

“... reduced me to sudden tears.) I began absorbing ever more specialised fare: Macdonald’s books, Taylor and Tuchman on the political background, battle histories of Gallipoli, Verdun and Passchendaele, books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor ...”

“... on the dominance of the big seven private housebuilding companies – in descending order of size, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Homes, Persimmon, Bellway, Redrow, Bovis and Crest Nicholson – who between them have almost 40 per cent of the market in new homes. But the most striking thing in the document is a chart displaying the history of Britain, in housebuilding ...”

“... Quite simply it caused nearly all of the 72 deaths. ‘There’s a moment,’ the fire expert Stephen Mackenzie told me, ‘when the tactics have to move from “remain in place” to “assisted evacuation”.’ It had been obvious from very early on, even to spectators on the ground, that the fire at Grenfell Tower was not going to be put out, that it ...”