“... without naming him, the same figure in the future, wearing what would be his face tomorrow: the king who in Henry V, disguised, fraternises with his soldiers on the eve of battle, and realises that only ‘ceremony’, and, in Wheeler’s gloss, ‘secrecy, mystery, inscrutability, silence’, raises him above them. The heart’s ease of talk is ‘within ...”

“... that Shelley published – Original Poetry; by Victor and Cazire (1810), Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810) – his broadsheet, The Devil’s Walk (1812), and a fascinating book-length poem he did not manage to publish: ‘The Wandering Jew; or, The Victim of the Eternal Avenger’ (written 1809-10). There are also ‘Ten Early Poems’, most ...”

“... it as a transit camp for captured enemy pilots. The US army took it over in 1946, renamed it Camp King and used it for ‘special interrogations’, involving torture, beatings and drug injections, carried out by Counterintelligence Corps officers known as ‘rough boys’. The disposal of bodies was, one CIA officer recalled, ‘no problem’.The ‘rough ...”

“... even a dead Enemy might bite back.) Still more complex was his relationship with Eliot. Professor King suggests that Eliot was for Read a father figure ‘whom he could emulate, rebel against and, at times, loathe’, and that seems about right. Eliot published Read’s poems, his essays, and some of his books about art, but at times was sharply critical of ...”

“... know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too’), yet how unlike it all was to the home life of our own dear Queen. Even 20th-century feminists have complained that, apart from declining to realise herself fully as a woman, she did ...”

“... realism’; but her realism is seldom deep enough to warrant its self-consciousness. Margaret Drabble appears to want to combine Dickens and Woolf, to combine caricature and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most ...”

“... earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him.’ It gave a key to ...”

“... ministers would never dare tamper with the diplomatic correspondence of foreign princes, as ‘the king’s sister, I may claim as much or more respect from them’. When Charles continued to follow his father’s preference for diplomatic negotiations over military deployments, Elizabeth relayed to the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, that she had ...”

“... expertise around child health and development. Feeding and Care of Baby (1913) by Frederic Truby King, a New Zealand-born doctor, was reprinted several times in Britain after he visited the country in 1917. He worried about the ‘injudicious handling’ of the ‘babies of the Empire’; good habits, he said, came from the strict allowance of mother’s ...”

“... got the hang of Twitter, and now he feels that he was negligent in not doing so. He notes that Margaret Thatcher did all right without it – indeed, ‘the very idea that she could have contained her thoughts to 140 characters is preposterous. The Lady was not for tweeting. But I should have been.’ Really? Not only is the thought of Brown tweeting his ...”

“... not only because of the faith of the ‘gaunt and ghastly’ Earl, but because Edie Ochiltree, the King’s beadsman, an itinerant sage of proud bearing and wild white hair who encounters the Earl in his private chamber, might also have been a fit subject for Ribera’s brush. What Scott and his readers would have thought of as a typical painting by Velázquez ...”

“... Martin Loughlin arguably gets it in one: ‘By establishing the principle that acts of the king had an official character exercisable through certain forms, the charter constituted a landmark in the emergence of English governing arrangements.’ What followed was, as he says, messy. It took a long time for king and ...”

“... Traditionally, the patriarch as a literary character is not let off so lightly. Beside Job, King Lear and the Vicar of Wakefield, Harry Caldecote most certainly has nothing to complain of. The biggest threat to his peace of mind comes, one would guess, from the precocious minicab driver who warns him that the whole ‘drinking culture’ is destined to ...”

“... albeit strong Unionists both – have been willing to go as far as Law took his party: telling the King’s Private Secretary, in January 1914, that if the Liberal Government failed to call an election on the Home Rule Bill, they must ‘prepare for the consequences of civil war’? It was this letter, Asquith told Redmond a week later, that had convinced the ...”

“... Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the legend, Candaules dies for thinking his ...”