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“... devours: Birds, beasts, trees, flowers; Gnaws iron, bites steel; Grinds hard stones to meal; Slays king, ruins town, And beats high mountain down. But if time is of the essence, what is the essence of time? ‘I know what time is,’ St Augustine said, ‘but if someone asks me, I cannot tell him.’ Physicists and philosophers have much the same ...”

“... Africanist, Leo Frobenius. Four kings rule the great realm of Kasch. The richest of these is the king of Naphta, but he reigns only for a limited period, for the priests of Naphta are nightly studying the stars to discover the auspicious moment to kill him and appoint a new king in his place. ...”

“... of a dozen to do wrong what he does right – and a slew of British directing talent led by Stephen Daldry has brought it to the small screen. The British settings are spectacular, the whole thing like an implosion of David Kynaston, but the main achievement is Morgan’s, in finding ways to show the human side of monarchy. The British royals are a ...”

“... who turned out at his rallies, who made him feel like a populist leader, like a patriot, like a king, like a billionaire – like all the things he wasn’t, except in his imagination. ‘Very special’, he called them on 6 January, as they rioted in the Capitol. The Republicans, like his wives, were always temporary partners whom he’d used (just as ...”

“... first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ‘Ann saved my life.’ It’s an ingenious reading, though I’m not persuaded. Germaine Greer has no ...”

“... she might as easily have been a scientist, like her father (an entomologist) or her brother Stephen (an astrophysicist). She shares her father’s despairing ecological awareness, together with her brother’s logically detached interest in the nature of time. Both concerns are evoked in childhood memories of strenuous field trips in the Canadian ...”

“... of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something different for King Alfred and Queen Victoria, but ‘the state structure built round the English monarchy’ being the core of it. I am not sure that this is any harder a job to do now than it was for Clark and his authors, who, Roberts says, shared with their readers ‘a ...”

“... speech acts’, we remain condemned to a ‘static view of any given sonnet’. Gently criticising Stephen Booth’s account of the contrary pulls in sonnet 146, she that grants that his discussion is ‘interesting’, but finds it too preoccupied ‘with meaning alone’. The editorial and critical accounts published over the last thirty years do not pay ...”

“... minister. The most blatant ‘Fascist’ move in the Britain of 1968 came when Cecil Harmsworth King, a hereditary owner of newspapers, invited Earl Mountbatten to seize the governance of Britain. Had the Earl been corruptible, or mad, we might have had a coup d’état of Latin American proportions. The essence of National Socialism is to exploit the ...”

“... The author of King Solomon’s Mines and She composed his own epitaph, which was carved in black marble. It read: Here lie the Ashes of Henry Rider Haggard Knight Bachelor Knight of the British Empire Who with a Humble Heart Strove to Serve his Country Nothing there about his ripping yarns, the first of which had been hyped, in 1885, as ‘The Most Amazing Story Ever Written ...”

“... who, as all O and A-level candidates know, endlessly, remorselessly, ‘develop’? Admittedly, Stephen Potter’s The Muse in Chains had offered to blow the gaff in 1937. But pell-mell postwar expansion, to say nothing of Potter’s decline into a chronicler of comfy national foibles, soon settled its hash. ‘English’ seemed to be just there: as natural ...”

“... Defying the advice of the King of Hearts to the White Rabbit, the Oxford History of the Laws of England began in the middle, with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law ...”

“... shantymen on the trading ships that had made the likes of Mr Podsnap wealthy. Oh, Louis was the King of France before the Revolution Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe But Louis got his head cut off, which spoiled his constitution Away, haul away, we’ll haul away, Joe. It’s therefore worth being cautious about proposed constitutions, whether for ...”

“... off every now and again in a chauffeur-driven car provided by the Post to check whether the ex-king was leaving via the nearby Lympne airport. (He had sailed off in a destroyer.) It was appropriate that Deedes should end up with Waugh in Abyssinia, providing the model for William Boot. Anyone who remembers how, on Lord Copper’s orders, Boot is outfitted ...”

“... to execution when his father reneged, peacefully playing what I would call ‘bulliers’ with King Stephen, who hadn’t got the heart even to frighten him. Clearly childhood status was often recognised and appreciated. It there was a difference between Medieval and modern conditions, one might expect it to come from the notion of the ‘higher ...”