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“... whenever I have thought with great care of a prose paragraph, I have framed it in my mind in French, or more rarely in Latin, and have then translated into English; whereas whenever it was a matter of such attempts at verse as I have made, my thinking has been done exclusively in colloquial English. When, on the other hand, it has been a matter of ...”

“... that Jane was at Anne Boleyn’s side on the cross-Channel trip of 1532, when the English and French courts met, and when, detained in Calais by storms at sea, Anne eventually went to bed with Henry. Jane may have been with the queen when Elizabeth was born, and when she suffered two miscarriages, but we don’t know what Jane thought about any of ...”

“... lovely curly hair … You were also rather dirty, which I rather liked, too … Well, I think I’ll have to write my memoirs, just to set things straight. In his letter remembering their first meetings Lowell returned to the image of water. ‘But the fact is we were swimming in our young age, with the water coming down on us, and we were gulping.’ In ...”

“... dark in appearance, teensiest hint of a moustache – a cross between Mme Moller (high school French teacher) and a slightly defective but still gorgeous Audrey Hepburn. More femme than butch in style (favours flowing chitons, the odd bangle, funny sandals with lots of straps) but good too at outdoorsy things, such as pounding in tent pegs and spotting ...”

“... Who was the Earl of Antrim? He was the Irish Catholic, Randall McDonnell, who had married Katherine, the widow of the Duke of Buckingham and herself a Catholic convert. Until moving to Ireland late in 1638 with her new husband, the Duchess occasionally carried messages between Archbishop Laud and the Papal agent at the Court of Henrietta Maria, George ...”

“... mocker of forms in religion as in all else. You might, at court, publicly defend before Henry and Katherine of Aragon the daring of Erasmus’s new translation of the New Testament, having long ago aligned yourself with Colet and with Erasmus in the search for the true meaning of the Greek. A propos, you might deal out to monks, friars and retardataire clergy ...”

“... between us, Mr Burke,’ replied the Doctor, in an equally authoritative tone – ‘and I’ll give you an answer. There Sir! By the EYE! I should have looked at him thus Sir thus!’ Burke instantaneously averted his head, and, making no reply, evidently acknowledged this basiliskan authority. As Porter notes, the ranks of madhouse keepers included ...”

“... involvement as an intermediary in the marriage negotiations between Mary Mountjoy, daughter of the French Protestant family with whom Shakespeare lodged near the Barbican in 1604, and their apprentice, Stephen Belott (who subsequently obliged Shakespeare to testify in a lawsuit over the non-payment of £60 supposedly promised to him as a dowry). Beyond this at ...”

“... were protected.’ When her mother, Mary Kate, drew the talent of her daughter to the attention of Katherine Miller, a white woman for whom she cleaned house, Simone found her first patron. Miller paid for the piano lessons which the Waymon family couldn’t afford and steered the child at the age of five to Muriel Mazzanovich (‘Miss Mazzy’), the British ...”

“... Morgan Williams from Glamorgan, who became an innkeeper in Putney, lucked out when he married Katherine Cromwell, the elder sister of the Thomas Cromwell who went on to become Henry VIII’s great minister. Morgan’s son Richard entered his uncle’s service and changed his name to Cromwell in 1529. (Occasionally Oliver referred to himself as ‘Cromwell ...”

“... of wool for £210. Like the glover’s paring-knife, these ‘tods’ (a unit equivalent to 28 lb) resurface in a play-text – this time in The Winter’s Tale, where a shepherd struggles to reckon up the value of a shearing: ‘every ’leven wether tods; every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to?’ By my ...”

“... He also took against the Corsicans, who combined ‘the worst qualities of the Italians and the French’. Later, when he was nearly forty and owned a house in Verbier, he delivered his opinion on the Swiss, or, as he put it, ‘the goddam Swiss’: they were, he wrote, ‘the ugliest race alive’. Truman Capote, in his letters, made many judgments. He ...”

“... in his office and in the same way the pupils of another candidate for secular sainthood, the French philosopher Simone Weil, saw to it that their adored teacher did not suffer the consequences of a practical un-wisdom even more hopeless than Kafka’s. One cannot say that Kafka’s marvelling at mundane accomplishments was not genuine, was a ploy. The ...”

“... it featured Hamlet, dated from a decade or more earlier; it seems to have taken its events from a French prose narrative of the 1570s, which itself translated and adapted a Norse legend embedded in Saxo Grammaticus’s 13th-century Danish History. The original Norse legend is very brutal and very bloody. The further source or impulse of Elizabethan revenge ...”

“... adept at Internet navigation – ever Googles me and sees what I’m writing now, I doubt if she’ll be pleased. Some of my liking, I confess, arises from sheer Southern California white trash fellow feeling. Pepper was born near Los Angeles and spent most of his rackety life (as I have) on the West Coast. His father was a shipyard worker and nasty ...”