“... fifty or sixty thousand. The 17th and 18th-century poor, in the days when Britain constituted what Peter Linebaugh has called a thanatocracy, are uncommemorated, as are the apprentices, the economic migrants and the vagrants who were hanged for trifling crimes against property. Even the infamous victims remain unnamed. There is no mention of Jack Sheppard, the ...”

“... safer with a fifty-year-old President. Other stock characters are borrowed from fiction, notably King Solomon’s Mines, which D.M. Thomas read with interest when he was a small boy in Australia. Like other boys, he wondered what sort of quarterdeck language Commander Good used when he was swearing at Zulus and whether he responded erotically to the devotion ...”

“... bathtub figures towards the end of the poem, when the Trojan hero Hector (as I will call him: Peter Green believes we should eradicate the familiar Roman equivalents for Homer’s names, so he calls him Hektōr) has been killed by Achilles (and, phew, Green calls him Achilles rather than Akhilleus: two cheers for inconsistency). Hector’s ...”

“... of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy Mitford, although persuaded by her husband, Peter Rodd, to don a black shirt and gush in print on behalf of TPOF (The Poor Old Führer), was already marshalling the Union Jack Shirts for her novel Wigs on the Green. But it was not until 1938 that P.G. Wodehouse brought on Sir Roderick Spode and his Black ...”

“... the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of verse-forms a language that is coarse, prosey and, some say, as they at first said about Larkin, scarcely the language of poetry at all. Reading’s vernacular England isn’t to be ...”

“... even more, say, than one of the great social pariahs of our own time, Jean Genet – an outlaw.’ Peter Robb is well aware that it was Caravaggio’s detractors – and chiefly the great theorist and critic Bellori – who associated the dark, dirt and violence of his character and deeds with the subjects and style of his paintings, but Robb’s book provides ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period people were in the business of making images for themselves and investing ...”

“... together. Elena was now Helen, Mummy not Mami; Papa became Daddy; the boys were still Donald and Peter, of course, but they had far fewer words at their disposal by which to express themselves. They were now British – British refugees, to be exact – not just because their identity documents said so, but because their survival depended on it. And thus ...”

“... you accord him the ultimate homage, and become an Elvis impersonator, remaking yourself as the King right down to the Queen Bess high collars and the heel-shaped sideburns the size of Italy; or else your favourite Elvis story will be the one in Albert Goldman’s biography, of how he nearly drowned in a bowl of minestrone soup – so bombed out one day on ...”

“... he shaped the course of events. At the Restoration he had to counter the charge that the day the King was executed was chosen to conform to his prognostication. Through the key years of the Civil War he had forecast Parliamentary victory and royal defeat (he predicted victory at Naseby, the key battle of the war), and Royalists complained that his almanacs ...”

“... the best essays in this book deals with the night scene in Henry V. On the eve of Agincourt, the King, disguised, moves among the common soldiers and is drawn into an argument about the war in which they are all engaged. It is a scene from which, through the centuries, commentators have flinched. The truth is that we are not given what we expect and desire ...”

“... national identity. He was deeply upset by the decision to wind up the Raj, ending the rule of the king-emperor Brigadier Powell had pledged during the war to maintain. He was working in the Conservative Research Department at the time, alongside more worldly, easy-going political aspirants, who mocked his atavistic convictions. It was one thing to oppose the ...”

“... the learned classical citations and modern scientific observations is that the Pope is like the king bee (the biology still needed to be sorted). ‘If you should irritate his sting, flee,’ one caption reads; but elsewhere the Apiarium ‘anxiously proclaimed’ that ‘the benignity of bees heads off both innate and acquired faults.’ The bottom line is ...”