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“... is never quite a ‘life’. Now at last we have a biography that pulls out all the right stops. David Riggs provides a fastidious, challenging and compassionate reading of the man. Not everyone will agree with some of its psychiatrist’s couch diagnoses – anal fixations, stepfather traumas, and so on – though personally I find them ...”

“... Park Honan has done one of the two already, and now has done the other. Coming shortly after David Riggs’s solid, even too-solid The World of Christopher Marlowe, his Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy feels a little lightweight. He is probably right to say that he has a better story about Marlowe’s origins in Canterbury and his doings at Corpus ...”

“... a sizeable proportion of the detailed evidence we have about him dates from May and June 1593. For David Riggs, coming to the subject of Marlowe after writing Ben Jonson: A Life (1989), the paucity of material must have been fairly dismaying. The long-lived Jonson went out of his way to make things easy for biographers, leaving an extensive paper trail ...”

“... mentioned by Nicholas Rowe in 1709) adds force. The book opens with a brisk pair of essays by David Fallow and Michael Wood on the subject of his parents: John Shakespeare, born in about 1530, the son of a tenant farmer in the outlying village of Snitterfield, and Mary née Arden, some years younger, of a more prosperous family from Wilmcote. Neither of ...”

“... Cholmeley, but in each case orchestrated by Thomas Drury. A letter discovered a few years ago by David Riggs further highlights Drury’s involvement, because it shows he had a prior connection with Lord Keeper Puckering. On 8 November 1592 Lord Buckhurst wrote to Puckering: I did speak to Mr Drury according to your Lordship’s desire, and after a ...”

“... are concerned, are largely box-ticking exercises. According to a US Senate report, Riggs Bank described one of its PEP clients as ‘a retired professional who achieved much success in his career and accumulated wealth during his lifetime for retirement in an orderly way’. The PEP in question was General Augusto Pinochet, who held between $6 ...”

“... a delicious freedom from further instructions from home base.The year after Trafalgar, Sir Home Riggs Popham insouciantly scooped up the Cape of Good Hope, before convincing himself that Pitt (who had in fact just died) would be delighted if he sailed up the River Plate and captured Buenos Aires, which again he managed with little difficulty. The Ministry ...”