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“... for Brasenose College. From the summer of 1644 until Oxford’s surrender two years later, St Mary’s College, as it was then known, was the royal army’s only fixed medical facility in the city. Parliament fared better, helped by the existing infrastructure in London, the backing of the College of Physicians and, Gruber von Arni argues, its greater ...”

“... about got you from Shakespeare’s tragedies being performed in Southwark and Donne preaching at St Paul’s to Congreve’s comedies being performed in Covent Garden. Instead of staying in London and making the occasional foray out of town – critics have tended to make it only as far as George Herbert’s Bemerton or ...”

“... on 26 April 1564. The actual date of his birth is unknown. The convention that it was 23 April, St George’s Day, is a wishful synchronicity first mooted in the 18th century; Thomas De Quincey’s counter-suggestion, that the date chosen for his granddaughter’s wedding – 22 April – commemorated his birthday, is attractive. He was one of 39 ...”

“... be more of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then ...”

“... that they were merely being compensated rather than corrupted. As the anti-Union politician George Lockhart of Carnwath remarked, the Equivalent was ‘the cleanliest Way of bribing a Nation, to undo themselves; and alas! It had the design’d Effect.’ Daniel Defoe, working in Edinburgh as an English spy, noticed how easily the Equivalent ...”

“... was the warm, southern equivalent of Scott’s Highlands: an Edward Waverley from Moscow or St Petersburg might expect adventure, romance, intrigue, death. The mountains of the region were fabled (Noah’s ark was supposed to have passed through the twin peaks of Mount Elborus). Beyond the natural border of the River Terek was an alluring and dangerous ...”

“... straight down through the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of ...”

“... different angles on many of the same issues and individuals. Haydon is there, at the Coronation of George IV, a figure in the crowd, describing the ‘silken roar’ as it rose. The Carlyles trail glumly through the chapter on building, hunting for a suitable house. With the exception of a disappointing essay on the theatre the accounts interconnect and ...”

“... and credulous, Newtonian. This was a work whose reputation travelled, from Leipzig to Lisbon, from St Petersburg to Paris. Dubious anecdotes about apples and rhetorical flourishes about God’s handiwork proliferated in its wake. One witty Frenchman, Newton’s first biographer, compared his subject’s genius with the Nile – none knew its source, and it ...”

“... largely considered. Carey tells of a drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden. There are other reports of barely credible drunken violence and insult. Sometimes it ...”

“... and moved to a cottage in Hampshire, in a village called Steep, where he lived for two years. Andrew Sinclair, in Francis Bacon: His Life and Violent Times (1993), includes a few sentences on his stay. Daniel Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an ...”

“... my diet’. The instinct Freud recognised as Thanatos was dramatised by Shaw as ‘the gospel of St Andrew Undershaft’. (Incidentally, Freud and Shaw shared a fondness for the Salvation Army.) Cusins is allured into accepting the Undershaft inheritance by the Dionysian intoxication of pure destruction (which is why Cusins’s Greek scholarship ...”

“... of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the ...”

“... necklace of pleasure palaces; the most spectacular being the Trocadero, a 3500-seater designed by George Coles and featuring the largest Wurlitzer organ in Europe. The Elephant was universally acknowledged as ‘the Piccadilly Circus of South London’ and stood at the heart of a satellite belt of 42 active cinemas. Beside the Coronet, now a ‘multi-media ...”

“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”