I don't remember when or why I acquired this, but I obviously bought it without opening it first. It turns out to be one of those slightly embarrassing books Rowse wrote after retiring from All Souls', the sort of tory rant that might be quite entertaining in the setting of the Telegraph letters page or a High Table dinner, but soon gets tedious on the printed page. After a couple of pages on what a wonderful, funny, caring, empathetic, red-blooded sort of writer Shakespeare was, he moves on to his actual subject: "But Milton was a Cambridge man". He doesn't really need to say any more, does he?

All the same, he goes on for another couple of hundred pages, praising Archbishop Laud and the Stuarts, condemning the puritans and Parliamentarians (whom he treats as though they were 17th-century Brexiteers) and generally rubbishing the fizzing and subversive intellectual world that Milton existed in. And, of course, being Rowse, he has a Theory: Milton was a repressed homosexual. If he'd done what Rowse would have done in his place and picked up a couple of sailors for the evening, Paradise Lost might have been a very different epic. Hmmmm. ( )