“... Jahrhundert (1888), an example which has rarely been followed. Brown’s next book, A Palace for a King (1980), written in collaboration with a ‘plain’ historian, John Elliott, studied the court of Philip IV and the building of the Palace of the Buen Retiro on the outskirts of Madrid. Behind the enterprise loomed the ...”

“... the wild landscape of the estate he owned in south-west Scotland. The setting is commemorated by John Haddington’s fine photographs, and the initiative richly documented by John McEwen (Keswick’s nephew), in Glenkiln. The sculpture by Moore which is most eloquent in this context is the bronze seated ...”

“... Yet tonight the cemetery of hope and idealism is empty. Jack Kennedy is alive. Martin Luther King is alive. Bobby Kennedy is alive. James Baldwin is alive. Janis Joplin is alive. Jack Kerouac is alive. Jimi Hendrix is alive. Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a ...”

“... John Skelton should be one of the great figures of English poetry. He is widely regarded as the most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas Wyatt; but it has to be said that the competition for the top ranking south of the Scottish border is not very fierce, and until the 1930s such a judgment would have struck most people as bizarre ...”

“... gloves, which were unsporting. No gesture was involved, but a certain amount of quiet conviction. John Betjeman and Joan Hunter-Dunn would have approved: indeed Betjeman was a great admirer of Blunden’s poetry. His English Poems ‘was the first book by a living poet I remember saving up to buy. I learned many of his poems by heart and can still recite them ...”

“... them ‘immediately’. In this Arthur C. Clarke scenario, the reader will sit in his/her study in John O’ Groats, log onto the BLOC, order by keyboard a selection of the 141 items on ‘Shakespeare, William: Hamlet’, and hey-presto have them delivered at a super-fast baud rate to his/her PC. That is the Science Fiction version. The Real World ...”

“... of Liston and Ali on encountering the Beatles. The Louisville Lip engaged in cool banter with John and Ringo. Liston’s reaction, like his boxing style, was rather blunt. ‘Are those the motherfuckers that everyone’s been talking about?’ he asked when he saw them on the Ed Sullivan Show. ‘My dog plays drums better than the kid with the big ...”

“... masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban America, and a participator in its ritual matings and partings, than if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex ...”

“... Patterson displays no moral indignation towards religious intolerance.) This wasn’t the king’s preference, but it was the price he paid for a quiet life, for not having to go ‘on his travels again’. It also led to nearly every political crisis of the reign and ultimately to dependence on secret treaties that were none too secret and to Puritan ...”

“... Anthology, where Pound explicitly pays his dues by way of the parenthetical epigraph: ‘(King Charles)’. But in this case Pound’s adaptation is so inferior that there’s no point quoting anything but the Browning original. This is a deeper and more troubling poem than ‘Kentish Sir Byng’, because it articulates the all but suicidal sentiment ...”

“... all to itself in the National Gallery; but I doubt if anyone has gone into it so pertinaciously as John North. North is an expert in the history of astronomy and mathematics, so naturally his view of the painting emerges from the jumble, which he does not regard as a jumble, of astronomical and time-telling instruments sitting on top of the carpet-covered ...”

“... The dominant ideas were principally extracted from the pontifical utterances of ‘sages’, in John Holloway’s expression, like Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Bagehot, Froude, Huxley, Morley, Arnold. The team-written Wellesley Index project went on from this quest to anatomise the élite Victorian mind at a lower archaeological level than that of the pre-eminent ...”

“... Mars shall on his altar sit/Up to the ears in blood. I am on fire.’ And Harriet Walter’s king – legs splayed as if on a bar stool rather than a throne – conveyed an authority which the whole world knows is fraudulent because it was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin Richard II, who had ...”

“... by a gust of testosterone and a few tumbleweeds of pubic hair: the Old Man, the Deep Male – Iron John. Iron John, a short work of psychological, literary and anthropological speculation by the poet Robert Bly, ‘dominated’ the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year, and has made, as we shall see, a heavy ...”

“... full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court. Such determination, veering at times into wilfulness, continued undiminished until her death, 64 years later. By then she was Empress of India, and thanks to the carefully planned marriages of her ...”