I suppose this is old hat to most, but I just realized that one can use "Google Books" to look up people one knows and see if they are mentioned in obscure titles. For example, the author of this book has a small section attacking my post on virtuous sex from a couple years back. Here is the paragraph (from page 69):

Those Haunted by a Promiscuous Past

Sometimes the images in our head don't relate to what was done to us, but instead to what we did willingly. Today it's normal to experiment sexually long before people decide to commit. One opinion piece being debated widely around the internet as I write this says that premarital sex actually enhances marital happiness! (endnote).

The author couldn't be more wrong. . . .

The New York Times discusses Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia (which I have read but not seen) as well as the background reading one should do in order to "get" the play. Berlin, Gogol, and Herzen are on the list, as well as Nabokov, Pushkin, Turgenev and others.

I frankly didn't care for the plays upon reading them, but will most likely see them anyway, hoping to be surprised. Even if I am not, I am always happy to gather data. NPR's Weekend Edition also had a story.

For one other investigation of the importance of elite preservation of hunting rights, see HOWARD PYLE, THE MERRY ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD IN GREAT RENOWN IN NOTTINGHAMSHIRE (1883). There are many accounts of Robin Hood’s (likely fictional) life but by Pyle’s account, both Robin Hood and many of his men have been outlawed for having “poached the king’s deer.” Id. at 6. Robin himself was a poacher for sport, but many of his coterie “had shot deer in hungry wintertime, when they could get no other food.” Id. at 7.
The punishment was the cropping of ears, id. at 5 (“‘thou hast killed the King's deer, and, by the laws of our gracious lord and sovereign King Harry, thine ears should be shaven close to thy head. . . .’”), a barbarism that at least one early Congressman worried would be forbidden by the Eighth Amendment. See 1 Annals of Cong. 783 (1789) (statement of Rep. Livermore) (“villains often deserve . . . having their ears cut off; but are we in future to be prevented from inflicting th[is] punishment[] because [it is] cruel?”); U.S. CONST. amdt. 8 (forbidding “cruel and unusual punishments”). But see Anthony F. Granucci, “Nor Cruel and Unusual Punishments Inflicted:” The Original Meaning, 57 CAL. L. REV. 839 (1969) (arguing not).