“... he devoted a great deal of his later imaginative effort precisely to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain ...”

“... believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The king was never ‘George’ still less the queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not for him). What I remember of that night and of subsequent public celebrations up to and including the Festival of Britain was the impact of floodlighting and the sense ...”

“... it emerged that Francis Willis, the divine-cum-physician who had treated him, had allowed the King to shave himself with a cut-throat razor. As Frederick Reynolds related the story a quarter of a century later, Edmund Burke immediately demanded to know ‘If the Royal patient had become outrageous at the moment, what power the Doctor possessed of ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... bully boy, reputed to be the toughest kid in the park, and with a title to boot, something like ‘king’ or ‘prince’, along those lines. My brother went out of his way to find the boy, who was sitting against a tree surrounded by admirers, and said something provocative to him, and as the kid made ready to stand up, my brother hammered him, snapping the ...”

“... made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there’. The madness, too, of her father, John Guthrie, whose eyes slip ‘up and down her dress’ when Chris is harassed by a local ‘daftie’ and ‘peep out’, like those of ‘a caged beast’, when he sees her in her knickers; who sneaks round the door of her room at night, ‘a great cat ...”

“... racist. Consciously or not, it also imitates far funnier and more successful examples, such as John Barth’s ‘Petition’ from Lost in the Funhouse, addressed to the King of Siam. The novel is not, contrary to confused assertions in the Indian press, another attempt at a form of Indian magical realism in the wake of ...”

“... continue to be paired while at the Theatre School. After graduation ‘they remained an informal king and queen of their generation. Lidochka was impulsive, headstrong, full of vitality. George was detached, dreamy, mysterious.’ Kendall calls him ‘the revolutionary Pierrot’ to Lidia’s bold ‘flapper edition of Columbine’. These two poured their ...”

“... of his immediate family, had competed with one another to bring him the good news. As with a king, no one wants to be the bearer of grim tidings, but everyone wanted to be the one to say this was going to be huge. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, phoned him early to report: ‘It’s happening.’ Jason Miller, his senior election ...”

“... looking at Michael’s hands on the wheel and thinking how much nicer they are than my hands.*‘John Lennon,’ Michael said. ‘That’s the first thing Mum remembers, him being shot.’I said, ‘Is it?’‘Well, that’s what you told me.’Maureen is doing her homework. ‘It’s Miss Macaulay,’ said Michael. ‘Milestones. We did it two years ...”

“... from here.) After losing territory to the British in the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, King Mindon took control of the Yenangyaung oil fields – ‘effectively nationalising the industry’ – and did a deal with Price’s Patent Candle Company Ltd of London and Liverpool, selling them two thousand barrels of Burmese oil a month. In 1885, the ...”

“... when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’.On 27 September 1822, Jean-François Champollion wrote his Lettre à M. Dacier, presenting to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres his system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set ...”

“... identical versions of a pamphlet published in 1715. The grounds for allocating these items to John Oldmixon took many pages to set out, and include both ‘internal’ and ‘external’ evidence. Furbank and Owens rate the latter much more highly, but this may be in part because they associate internal evidence with the dredging up of ‘favourite ...”

“... demanding. In a perceptive if slightly laboured chapter that draws largely on the clinical work of John Bowlby, Wood describes Constant’s childhood – which included learning Greek at the age of five from a sadistic tutor – and its role in forming a personality characterised by an obsession with death, by uncertainty and indecision, and by a general ...”