“... at its worst’. But he expressed no shame about the role he played in sanitising it: the conquest and plunder of Abyssinia was, for him, ‘a thrilling experience, the climax to nine difficult, gruelling and sometimes dangerous months of war corresponding’. The event that altered his outlook, and that of so many others, was the Spanish Civil ...”

“... Little Review, serialised the novel.) Bryher financially supported her lover H.D. and her husband Robert McAlmon, who published Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway. There is also the suggestion, never quite substantiated by Souhami, that the way these women lived, their promiscuity and outsized influence, could itself be considered uniquely ...”

“... the rain. Unfair that we neither know nor care that the author of ‘O Worship the King’ was Robert Grant (1785-1838). Grant’s virtual anonymity is the clearest proof that he has entered into the folk-memory, his verses remembered or half-remembered by those who neither know nor care – nor need they – what it is they remember. And who can ...”

“... the 12th century, and that only then did bread take on its ‘almost mythical significance’. Pre-Conquest English sources indicate that bread with no butter, cheese or broth was one of the familiar trials of life, while the ‘Solomon and Saturn’ poem treats dropping bread on the floor almost as a blasphemy, at least as something requiring minor ritual ...”

“... He tried this out on the theologians, and had to be treated to a firm doctrinal lesson by Bishop Robert Grosseteste on the spiritual inferiority of coronation to the anointing involved in priestly ordination. But priest or not, at Westminster, the king at his coronation would stand, as the emperors stood, on a disc of Roman porphyry, and at the centre of a ...”

“... rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now obsolete, others, such as sacerdotal, now well established despite Winchester’s comment to the contrary; and why ...”

“... but to consider its significance, both for himself and for his son Jack, whose appetite for sexual conquest replicated his father’s. (Jack claimed he had to have a woman a day, or else he would come down with crippling headaches.) Nearly all their liaisons reflected unequal class relations – a pattern that suggests the sense of entitlement shared by father ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... is up against variant forms from 1766 and 1776; that an injustice may have been done to Sir Robert Walpole (‘All those men have their price’); that ‘It is the first step which counts’ gets its power from the miracle that followed St Denis’s execution – ‘Afterwards he picked up his head and walked for six miles’; that nobody ever quite ...”

“... a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed ...”

“... It offered the vacant throne to William and Mary. What if James returned? Isaac Newton consulted Robert Sawyer, the distinguished lawyer who, with him, represented Cambridge University in the Convention, and received the reassuring advice that to oppose a de facto king, even if on behalf of a lawful king, was treason. But James’s attempt to regain his ...”

“... white rather than the right stuff. The cocaine literature of the era reflected these attitudes: Robert Sabbag’s Snowblind (1976) was a gonzo-inflected account of how one man, Zachary Swan, single-handedly turned southern California onto coke; and while there’s plenty of nastiness in the tale (how could there not be?), the overall impression Sabbag gives ...”

“... called by Runciman, but Keegan prefers the probably more authentic Kitbuga) to complete the conquest of the Middle East. So far so good; and fifty years earlier this would have been child’s play for a Mongol army, preceded as it was by a paralysing legend of invincibility. If successful here they might have finished off the Caliphs for good and ...”

“... dependencies in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Iraq and parts of Iran. Thousands died during Ibn Saud’s conquest of the central Arabian peninsula in the first decades of the 20th century; he received a monthly stipend from the British government throughout. When the new Saudi regime was threatened by a rebellion in 1929, British troops helped put down the ...”

“... have no idea what it contains. In the 17th century, it was in the possession of the antiquarian Robert Cotton (who kept it in a bookshelf topped with a bust of the Emperor Nero – hence the shelf mark). Cotton owned a lot of manuscripts which announce their value the moment you open them. The Lindisfarne Gospels – Cotton MS Nero D iv – is unashamedly ...”