“... 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 ...”

“... social comedy. On the other side of the Atlantic, a mythic hero like Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King also bears the political weight of his nation’s encounters with the Third World. In the milder Canadian setting, Davies can place a domesticated myth more comfortably at centre stage, less overshadowed by any rival powers. Murther and Walking ...”

“... Giles Foden and Ann Harries have produced new examples of the genre. In his first novel, The Last King of Scotland, Foden brilliantly re-created the Uganda of General Amin, portrayed with increasing horror through the eyes of a naive young Scottish doctor. He evidently remembers Uganda very well (as I can vouch, having lived there a little earlier) and, in ...”

“... not with Ignatius, where visual description has nothing much to contribute, but with the glamorous Francis Xavier, or rather with his allegedly incorrupt body arriving back in Goa a year or so after his death in sight of China in 1552. Alive, he ‘stands on the waterfront bare-footed, black-cassocked and haloed, behind him a calm sea, busy with ships trimming ...”

“... Frye to sue the other members. When they protested through the Lords of the Admiralty to the King, the Chief Justice had the whole lot of them arrested for contempt and released them, when they apologised, with the warning: ‘Whosoever set themselves up in opposition to the law or think themselves above the law will find themselves mistaken.’ Why ...”

“... this fairyland, until, egged on by his mother, he stole a golden ball that belonged to the fairy king. On his way home he was tripped up by a couple of fairies, who took the ball and vanished. Elidyr was never again able to find his way into fairyland, but in later life he was quizzed by the bishop of St David’s about his experiences and claimed to be able ...”

“... medieval manuscripts, important naval documents, an early copy of Isaac Newton’s Principia and Francis Drake’s personal almanac. Nearly everything in the Bibliotheca Pepysiana – as Pepys insisted it forever be called – was tantalisingly rare and had become even rarer after the Great Fire devastated London booksellers. Magdalene was in no position to ...”

“... 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead ...”

“... across the European stage, trailing clouds of martial glory. But whereas Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France inherited the kingdoms they had been born in, Charles knew next to nothing about his new dominions. Arriving in Spain for the first time in 1517 to take up the crowns of Castile and Aragon, the teenage ...”

“... cities of the world London has ... for centuries had a uniquely ascendant position,’ asseverates Francis Sheppard. From their respective standpoints of two millennia of ebullient trading and a century of, to put it mildly, muddled planning, Sheppard and Michael Hebbert paint their pictures in the same bright colours: of a healthy, wealthy ...”

“... incurred a good deal of criticism. Particularly vocal was the British envoy to the Holy See, Francis d’Arcy Godolphin Osborne. Despite sharing some of the antisemitic prejudices of the British aristocracy, Osborne, a Protestant, was outraged by the Germans’ treatment of Jews. Appointed to his role in 1936, he became closely involved – under the ...”

“... The archbishop of Paris fretted to the prime minister that it could lead to the beheading of the king, ‘as is done in England’. Until the 1750s, the quarrel excited considerably more attention in France than the writings of a few daring philosophes. By the time of the Girard-Cadière affair, the quarrel had become extremely unequal. The pope, the ...”

“... be easier to read. One of Binns’s innumerable sidelights is his reminder of the existence of Sir Francis Kynaston’s translation of Chaucer, the Amorum Troili et Creseidae libri duo priores angli-co-latini, published with a facing-page text of Thynne, dedicated to the Royal Librarian, and beginning: Dolorem Troili duplicem narrare, ‘The double sorwe of ...”

“... the account of it is inaccurate in almost every detail (old men forget), he warned me that Cecil King, because I declined to do something he asked of me, would make sure I’d never find another job in London. In fact, as I rightly supposed, Mr King, if ever he had any such intention, which is very doubtful, simply had not ...”

“... realia of the working day We care about, only because we know How poor the realm is, how mad our king. Getting from regalia to realia sharpens the otherwise too civic progress of speech, and allows the passage to settle upon the ballad-desolation of the mad king. Hamburger’s best poems are not immediacies: his common ...”