“... absorbing. Hortense reports her sister Marie’s flirtation with the young (and as yet unmarried) King Louis and the way everyone teased her about it, but she’s more interested in recounting a practical joke played by their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, on their youngest sister, Marie-Anne, who was then about six. (Marie-Anne was to marry Maurice-Godefroy de la ...”

“... Alongside his preaching, the enterprising reverend ran a pulpwooding crew in which his nephew, James Hicks, was employed until he quit, nervous of his uncle’s increasingly sinister reputation. Quitting didn’t do him any good. In February 1976 Hicks, who was 22, was found dead in his Pontiac Firebird with some small cuts but – according to the autopsy ...”

“... being looted in Dartmouth. Promising Elizabeth £80,000 from the spoils (a ransom suitable for a king rather than a very lucky courtier) he shot off west. Over the next few years Ralegh was obliged to concentrate on West Country business, while he watched the Earl of Essex rise to royal favour. The two men had an uneasy truce, during which Ralegh sailed ...”

“... tragedies like Hamlet: this of course gives the play its mysterious third line, ‘Long live the king!’ At the end of long phases of fascism in the modern world, we think of power as corrupting, even absolutely corrupting, but a very great work of creation, such as Creation itself, can be, as it is revealed by God to Job, sublime, mysterious and good. In ...”

“... forcible removal of a belt might imply, is unclear. But his companion on the mission, the Athenian king Theseus, certainly either rapes or elopes with Hippolyta’s sister, Antiope, and takes her back to Athens as his wife. (In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare, following a minor variant of the myth reported by Plutarch, calls her Hippolyta, not ...”

“... strip them of the sense that they, too, were hidalgos, with leaders who were more royal than any king or sultan; they were the nobility of Jerusalem ‘that is in Sepharad’, as the prophet Obadiah had said, and as Bishop Alonso de Cartagena reiterated; and their leaders were reputedly of the stock of King David. To ...”

“... of ourselves and, in the tradition of Shakespeare, blend the roles of girl and boy, man and woman, king and fool, queen and servant.’ One of the desperate acts of her youth involved stealing tools, first a spanner to fix her bike, then a hammer, and hiding them in her clothes so that she, like Falstaff, would have heft, sheer mass, more metal, and wouldn’t ...”

“... predecessors. Perhaps the main reasons lie in 20th-century history. The Victorian statue of King Alfred of Wessex which stands in the market square of his birth-place, Wantage, testifies to a pride in that great founding father which modern England no longer feels. We have shrunk, and Alfred has shrunk with us. Perhaps, too, the defeat of Nazism left ...”

“... Queen Elizabeth. The greater part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary ...”

“... will be no occasions of it. The first two occasions offered dismal precedents. Mary I’s consort, King Philip of Spain, was dangerously powerful in his own right, and only Mary’s barrenness saved England from becoming yet another component of the Habsburg Empire. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, avoided the problem by avoiding matrimony altogether. Anne’s ...”

“... to outdo all autodidacts. His next, barely more palatable option was to join his elder brother James in his Boston printing works. Josiah had whipped Benjamin regularly, and now James beat him too, for smuggling saucy comment pieces into the New-England Courant under the alias of a worthy widow called Silence Dogood ...”

“... book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King and Brian Patten and Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless lists; narrative gets ...”

“... In​ autumn 2000, the critic, memoirist and biographer James Atlas brought forth a Life of Saul Bellow that augured to be the literary event of the season, a crowning glory for author and subject. Bellow: A Biography was Atlas’s highly anticipated successor to his wunderkind biography of the brilliant, bedevilled Delmore Schwartz, whose combustible presence served as the inspiration for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Humboldt’s Gift ...”

“... in a male, homosocial elite, owes much to the ethos and economy that grew up around the court of King James VI and I. By 1605-8, the likely date of Timon, the Scottish king had been on the English throne for several years, and a pattern had been established. He bought the loyalty of the nobility and the affection of ...”

“... The alternative career fantasies of writers would make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. ‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,’ Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy at the age of 29, having just published More Pricks than Kicks ...”