“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has the potential to create ‘human phenotypes that have never been previously observed’. Stephen Hsu, founder of the embryo screening company Genomic Prediction, believes that genetic engineering ‘will one day create the smartest humans who have ever lived’.This statement would have seemed absurd to a previous generation of biologists and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... been resolved; many of its members believe that Hungary took a wrong turn in the year 1000, when King Stephen established Christianity in the country; many of them subscribe to the ideology of Turanism, which celebrates the Hungarians’ ethnic origins in the steppes of Central Asia. The party invited Iran to send Revolutionary Guards to Hungary in 2010 ...”

“... Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of right-wing Tory MPs like Julian Amery (originally seen helping Zog in Albania), Winston Churchill and ...”

“... to cause trouble in the school of Laon, Abelard comes back to Paris, perhaps under the auspices of King Louis’s chancellor Stephen de Garlande, to set up his own school in the cloister of Notre Dame. He becomes famous as the wizard of logic, launches the logical rage that was to govern or misgovern the next four centuries ...”

“... the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to swear to the preamble of the Act, since by doing so he would be denying Papal authority and implicitly rejecting the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. From 1527 he had been the ...”

“... were redefined and renamed, the names of the days and the months were changed, while the King of France was first renamed ‘the King of the French’ and finally ‘Citizen Capet’. It was a literary event in another sense, too. Controversialists on every side tried self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch ...”

“... giants, the Arche meets the Stereo, the Perennial meets the Fad. Mitchell cites at the start Stephen Jay Gould’s reference to the ‘archetypal fascination’ with dinosaurs (giving rise, as Gould puts it, to schemes to ‘turn the Jungian substrate into profits’) and wonders if dinomania is not, rather, a matter of ‘something specific to certain ...”

“... or Drobny (to say nothing of Agassi’s erstwhile brother-in-law Gonzales) could have taken the King of Las Vegas handily, his amazing speed, anticipation and racket control notwithstanding. The core of championship tennis has always been the attacking, i.e. serve and volley game. Ground strokes were important for opening up the court, making an approach to ...”

“... was a popular conceit in the 1640s. For royalists like Reresby, those who took up arms against the king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament ...”