“... is heir to. Myth: Kenner was amused to find that at a McDonald’s in Dublin the counter-girl wore her name-tag: Emer – Cucuhlain’s queen; from which extraordinary episode arose the admonition that ‘if you recover an heroic past, then face the fact that you’ll have it splattered all around you.’ Another fact you might face is the desirability of ...”

“... Almighty God that on becoming a British subject I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty King George VI, his heirs and successors according to law’ seemed not to be a problem. Fuchs is a brilliant mathematician and physicist; he also has an accurate memory and a remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts lucidly. I had some experience ...”

“... And in case you think it’s just a boy thing, Michiko Kakutani, awarded a Pulitzer for her ‘fearless and authoritative’ journalism, considers (in both the New York Times and the Scotsman) that Life is an ‘electrifying new memoir’ which will ‘dazzle the uninitiated’. Mr Richards, she says, writes in a prose which is ‘like his guitar ...”

“... Were poor and single business, to contend Against those honours deep and broad, wherewith Your Majesty loads our house. Leavis comments on the possible conflict between the figures implied by ‘deep and broad’ and ‘loads’, remarking that Shakespeare ‘has controlled his realisation to the requisite degree of incipience. And in this marvellously ...”

“... in readers of Scripture (she always capitalises the word). It furnishes the mental world of her characters and structures their stories. Her Gilead novels are a refraction of Genesis’s interest in wayward sons, familial deceit, guilt and hope, through the double prism of American religion and politics. James Wood ...”

“... change while remaining the same? Juliet Mitchell is a grande dame of Freudo-Lacanian feminism. Her first book, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), played a critical role in the feminist rehabilitation of Freud. The present one deals with hysteria, a neurosis reputed to be essentially feminine and the historical starting point of psychoanalysis ...”

“... voyage gave him ample time to finish editing the hefty etiquette guide that would undergird the majesty of his new court, at which his guards – all six-footers – would wear helmets decorated with a Mexican eagle on a prickly pear cactus, devouring a snake. A mere four years later, however, Maximilian’s crudely mummified body was returned to Trieste ...”

“... petitioner’s regiment, service, injuries and subsequent hardship. As Hannah Worthen explains in her chapter on military welfare in Kent, the petitions were constructed to a formula (address, case details, final exhortation) and written by a scribe, so there is an element of ventriloquism, as well as a possible embellishment of injury in order to win ...”

“... could not quite ignore the implication that to reject predestination was to limit the power and majesty of God. There is a tricky moment in the Argument to Book V, where Milton writes: ‘God, to render man inexcusable, sends Raphael to admonish him.’ Of course God foreknew that Adam would eat the apple, but foreknowledge, as God explains in Book ...”

“... The Resurrection was published as a chromolithograph. But the impact of the ‘awful and unearthly majesty in his countenance, in the large eyes fixed on vacancy, and in the still placid features’, and the effect of dawn light (the way the ‘cold grey morning creeps along the hills, and the dark trees stand motionless’), are better conveyed by Layard’s ...”

“... Hotel in Granard, a small town 16 miles from Longford town. ‘Auntie Thornton’, as we called her, was also involved in the Republican movement: on this occasion, however, it wasn’t subversion but match-making that was on her mind. Collins might have been a revolutionary leader in the making, but he was also a grand ...”

“... of Alice’s dream enjoy using the words ‘never’ and ‘always’. ‘Always say “Your majesty”,’ the Red Queen commands, while the old crab warns her daughter: ‘Let this be a lesson to you never to lose your temper!’ Wonderland has plenty of pedagogues, and Alice observes at one point that she might as ...”

“... in the Communist period must assume that the old Security Service built up a dossier on him or her. Mine is now in the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and I can read it. I don’t know what it contains. Much irrelevant rubbish, no doubt: surveillance teams have to justify their expenses. But one thing I am prepared for: reports to the secret ...”

“... any words or sentences to excite or stir up the people to hatred or contempt of the person of his Majesty, his heirs or successors, or the government and constitution of this realm as by law established … The words in this clause from ‘to excite, or stir up’ through to ‘government’ were taken almost verbatim from an act passed during the reign of ...”

“... and by his ‘strong possession’ of the throne, to which his mother, Eleanor, is prompted by her ‘conscience’ to reply in an aside: ‘Your strong possession much more than your right’. She knows Arthur to be the legitimate claimant. Lake swoops on the exchange, which is ‘intended deliberately to locate the play in the midst of’ the debates ...”