“... however, Heaney rather ‘expectedly’ throws his voice through the figure of Sweeney, the Ulster king who’s cursed by Saint Ronan and is transformed into a bird-man. In a note to Station Island Heaney writes: ‘A version of the Irish tale is available in my Sweeney Astray, but I trust these glosses can survive without the support system of the original ...”

“... The 20th century has seen several biographies of the last of the four, much the best of which is Christopher Hibbert’s two-volume study published nearly thirty years ago. The late E.A. Smith, who sadly died between the writing and the publication of this biography, thought that all previous studies were ‘to some degree superficial, and most follow the ...”

“... a salute. Their British officers established a governing council, met the local Koya Temne chief, King Jimmy, who ‘dress’d himself according to the English fashion, and conversed . . . in tolerable good English’, and dined with the regent King Naimbana’s British interpreter. Meanwhile, the settlers busied ...”

“... later Elizabethan churchmen had viewed the Presbyterian threat and the prospect of a Scottish king as head of the Church of England, but there was less need for nerves after 1604, when the esteem of bishops seems to have risen among the laity. The troubled Parliaments of the 1620s produced no challenge to the episcopal office. If the term ...”

“... for old-fashioned liberal triumphalism is offered by Marxism, and it’s no surprise to find Christopher Hill claiming that some sort of Whiggism is inescapable, nor to find Professor Pocock and Dr Clark denouncing Marxist historians as Whigs. The Marxist construes the 18th century as the century of the rise of the capitalist bourgeoisie: Locke was their ...”

“... to problems of figure and ground: how to combine the domestic scale with the broad view. Even Christopher Burns’s The Flint Bed, which looks to be going to find its subject in English provincial life, expands (via a plot tied to a photograph from 1975 of desperate refugees fighting to get onto a helicopter lifting off from the American Embassy in ...”

“... her definite superior in intelligence: the only one of Henry’s six wives whose marriage to the king was regularly called her ‘reign’ by contemporaries. That she had a mind of her own and was not afraid to use it is the most plausible explanation of her eventual downfall in 1536. Eric Ives’s biography of Anne, published in 2004, revealed her as a ...”

“... did or mean/Upon that memorable scene.’ The ode, remember, was to Cromwell but the bow was to King Charles I. With Chambers and Hiss, it can be hard to determine which was the Roundhead and which the Cavalier. As soon as possible after the collapse of Communism, Hiss asked the Russian authorities to look in their files and clear his name which, under the ...”

“... style has carried across from the 18th century, and is conducive to the lethal truth. ‘King George may be said to have helped by maintaining a level of unpopularity conducive to uprisings.’ ‘His peculiar talent was simply to voice unchanging principles, a sort of indolence which often passes for integrity.’ Such sentences execute Swift’s ...”

“... a hurry and you go from the Tet offensive in Vietnam to the strikes in Poland to the murder of Dr King and the ghetto insurrection, getting no time to take breath for les événements in France and the shooting of Robert Kennedy. Then comes the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the drama in the streets at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the butchery at the ...”

“... a Washington Post reviewer compared The Brotherhood of the Grape to The Brothers Karamazov and King Lear. Hyperbole aside, both Fante’s early novels are excellent – especially Ask the Dust, which does indeed make good on at least some of the comparisons listed above. The narrator is Arturo Bandini, a young man from a poor Italian family who has moved ...”

“... one but all mankind’s epitome. Merivel climbs into the resplendent and capricious patronage of King Charles II (here portrayed as the all-knowing fairy-tale autocrat) and for a time lives Persarum rege beatior, the purring recipient of gifts, favours, honours, the King’s loving confidant and clown. The highest honour ...”

“... On the outside of Christopher Wren’s Observatory Tower in Greenwich a ball still drops down at exactly 1 p.m. every day to indicate just what time it is. Captains in the Pool of London, the largest port in the world, used to spy it with their telescopes before they sailed, and adjust their chronometers. Ships and port have vanished, but the daily rite of time and precision is still enacted ...”

“... In this short book, Christopher Hitchens sets down the main charges against Kissinger: murder, violation of human rights and complicity in mass atrocities on a scale equalled only by Eichmann, Heydrich and the like. As Hitchens admits, he isn’t the first: Joseph Heller in Good as Gold was as blunt about it all as it was possible to be ...”

“... Two of these speakers told Pizarro that ‘their lord the dead man agreed’ to his proposal, as Christopher Heaney describes in his chronicle of five hundred years of encounters with the lively Andean dead.Soon after capturing Atahualpa, the conquistadors looted the palace of his father, Huayna Capac. They took his gold ornaments but left his preserved body ...”