“... friend is ‘an impassioned and eloquent expert’, full of stories about Quetzalcoatl, the god-king who takes the form of a plumed serpent; about wonderful coyotes and jaguars. ‘Mr Palomar’s friend pauses at each stone, transforms it into a cosmic tale, an allegory, a moral reflection.’ At the same time a group of schoolboys is being taken round the ...”

“... dispatched, but Cleopatra Selene was raised by Octavian’s sister and eventually married to the king of Mauretania. On 29 August, Octavian became the pharaoh of Egypt.Famous as its dénouement might be, the career of Marcus Antonius is somewhat shadowy. He was born a nobilis, which under the republic meant he had a consul as ancestor: since the expulsion of ...”

“... good novel of the great age of American paranoia, the age that began just before the Kennedy/King assassinations, and faded away somewhere in the early Nineties. It’s not that the Forties and Fifties didn’t have their paranoias, or that we are short of paranoids now. It’s that people didn’t always believe, and don’t have to believe, that what ...”

“... the mediocre musical written by Lerner and Loewe where, ‘for one brief shining moment’, King Arthur had enjoyed absolute power over his knights. (And Sir Lancelot over their women.) You might think that an invocation of mythical yet absolute monarchy would put bow-tied American scholars and editors on their guard. But you would be dead ...”

“... There was once a king who was troubled by all the misery he observed about him. So he summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into its causes. The wise men duly looked into the matter, and reported back to the king that the cause of all the misery was him. So runs Bertolt Brecht’s parable of the founding in 1923 of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, a centre for Marxist studies endowed by a wealthy German capitalist ...”

“... the kings of Northumbria and Mercia and East Anglia and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when King Alfred ...”

“... one of my feet or maybe even my neck.’ And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... Tudors rather than Henry VI gave us that incomparable monument of late medieval English Gothic, King’s College chapel, but the Protestant Reformation made it difficult to exploit a royal saintly cult. After some spirited ceremonial experiments in the opening months of the reign of Henry VIII’s son Edward, another boy-...”

“... But there is, apparently, more competition for the honour than up the road at Bertorelli’s. Michael Foot passes by and nods, albeit ‘briefly’. Marcia Williams sweeps in: expect no nods from her. She comes under the novelist’s scalpel: ‘She’s an attractive woman, her face has a good bone structure, but there’s something curiously unreal about ...”

“... and assume that Labour will sooner or later come a cropper. The Australian strategies adopted by Michael Howard and his advisers at this election were, on the other hand, very risky and, in the end, mistaken, exaggerating as they did the significance of immigration and crime within British politics. Many people ‘care’ about immigration and crime, but ...”

“... victor of Agincourt deserves to be considered a peace-maker as well as a warmonger. The ‘warrior-king’ tradition of both British and French historiography makes him an implacable enemy of the French, but later nationalistic preconceptions have obscured the 15th-century reality. The fact that the two realms of England and France, linked in a dynastic ...”

“... to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of derring-do romance. Michael Asher in his fine biographical study, Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia, does not attempt to do so. Asher, who has travelled by camel and by foot where Lawrence went before him, is intensely aware of the genuine ...”

“... twelve. And he’s only fifteen now but you wouldn’t know.He said, ‘Are you sure?’I said, ‘Michael. It’s a spot, love, that’s all it is,’ and I got him some stuff to put on.He gets his trousers up sharp.He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’‘Why should I tell Dad? Why should I tell Dad anything?’‘And don’t tell our Maureen.’‘As if,’ I ...”

“... on for itself the name of Israel. The two monarchies had only ever achieved unity under a single king for a brief period, and Judah was content to go its own way, cherishing its capital, Jerusalem, as a sacred place, with a monumental temple that became increasingly emblematic of Jewish faith and identity. For nine centuries, from its foundation until its ...”