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“... The following selection is then divided between political writings by Spenser, Beacon, Moryson, Davies and Temple, and a selection of poetry. This not only provides a generous selection from texts which, apart from the Spenser, are not easily available outside research libraries, but also offers the basis for an interesting political reading of Spenser’s ...”

“... of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked with an ...”

“... ought there to be a glossary, ‘ee by gum’ or ‘eeh baah gum’? (The issues are raised by William Neill when he prints two versions of the same poem on facing pages, both in dialect but one a good deal more dialectal than the other.) Since poets are not etymologists they may play fast and loose, as MacDiarmid did when assembling some of his lyrics ...”

“... Kempe, about whose orthodoxy there was at least considerable doubt, had as her parish priest William Sawtry, the first man to be burnt to death for Lollardy. If the authorities who interrogated her had known that, they might have felt that this was prima facie proof of contagion. Yet as far as one can tell, Sawtry had no influence on Margery Kempe at ...”

“... the vaults of Barclay’s Bank in a trunk deposited in 1820 by Byron’s Cambridge friend Scrope Davies. The latter series, dated 1809-19, are more obviously entertaining. To read them after the Greek letters is to be carried back to the Byron of the delightful third volume of the letters, that real-life Liaisons Dangereuses which covered the episode in 1813 ...”

“... and the other by a former bishop. Here one could quote, to some purpose, the actress Mandy Rice-Davies. Fifty-five years after Goebel’s book first came out it is still not clear who discovered the islands. It is doubtful if it ever will be. Goebel follows his energetic examination of all the known claims with an exhaustive account of why, in the light of ...”

“... and/or friends: specifically, on the part of Anne Shakespeare herself, acting through her brother William Hathaway – who would then be, as transmitter of the manuscript, the ‘Mr W.H.’ thanked by the publisher.* But the inclusion of ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ at the end of the 1609 collection has helped generate a different approach to the book. Until ...”

“... by bedding heiresses. No slavemaster had a higher scorn for aristocrats than the promiscuous Sir William Beckford, the exceedingly rich Lord Mayor of London who complained to Horace Walpole that the air of Richmond was so bad that 12 of his natural children had died there; to which one can only add that they would have died faster in the West Indies. East of ...”

“... although the trouble between Welles and Hull sucks in many other foreign policy characters (like William Bullitt, with whom Roosevelt broke over the Welles exposé), it has little political consequence. Welles was closer to the liberal New Dealers, Hull to the traditional Democratic Party, and those demanding action against the extermination of European ...”

“... essays. Observations of the gardens at Chatsworth, culled from a forgotten book by the antiquarian William Stukeley and an unpublished diary by Sir John Percival, make possible a significant contribution to the debate about the models for Timon’s villa in the Epistle to Burlington. Patient research into Chancery records yields an amusing note on ‘The Case ...”

“... his European self. Jo Stoyte, whose collection of books Pordage has come to archive, is a William Randolph Hearst-style Hollywood tycoon who owns ‘BEVERLEY PANTHEON, The Personality Cemetery’, a vast graveyard landscaped as a country estate which contains replicas of famous buildings from all over the world: of the Tower of Pisa (‘only this one ...”

“... Owen’s poems into print in her magazine, Wheels. With Façade, devised in collaboration with William Walton and first produced in 1922, she invented something new, a kind of Symbolist/Futurist performance poetry. Like her appearance, indeed her entire life, Façade treads fearlessly the fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous. Greene seems to ...”

“... narrative finds Orwell working for the BBC during the Second World War, in the cubicle next to William Empson. Orwell immediately propositioned Empson’s partner, Hetta Crouse, but to no effect. ‘It was the smell, Empson grimly implied.’ Sutherland reports that Hetta and Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, were in agreement about the deterrent of ...”

“... a long manuscript in the Mitchell Library at Sydney – by Richard Pennington. Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies did take the part of Etain in Rutland Boughton’s opera, The Immortal Hour in 1922, with Peter Shelving’s designs, and since she also acted in a play called Spring Tide which opened at the Duchess Theatre on 15 July 1936, we may safely bet that this ...”

“... In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular ...”