“... uses the phrase in a more nuanced way. His subtitle points to the fact that while Harold Godwinson may have been ‘the last English king’ (actually he was half-Danish), and possibly the ‘last of the Saxon kings’ (though that is just Bulwer-Lytton deflecting the shame of defeat away from England), unlike his predecessor, Edward the Confessor, he had no ...”

“... no more than rumour, like the one about Augustus and the figs. The most prolific court poisoner may have been the eunuch Bagoas, who is said to have killed two Persian kings before succumbing himself during a failed attempt on the life of Darius III (if you believe Diodorus of Sicily). During the long search for an elixir of life several Chinese emperors ...”

“... in its original scoring; the piano accompaniments for the others have a space and colour that may stem from their instrumental origins. ‘Orpheus with His Lute’, with words from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, opens the cycle with rising E major semi-quavers, and moments of harmonic shock, with voice and piano sometimes just a tone apart. ‘Under the ...”

“... puts this stale little homily in the mouth of the Duke of Norfolk in the ridiculous first scene of Richard II where two young lords spoiling for a fight, Norfolk and Bolingbroke, swagger before their monarch. No one explains the reason for their quarrel. Norfolk, rather like some of Mr Carter-Ruck’s clients, seems to be an over-sensitive upper-class ...”

“... over-treatment in the US, while fund-holding and drug budgets are feared here because they may encourage under-treatment). Both parties also believe that the recent NHS reforms are of quite momentous significance. A foreign observer might at first be puzzled, since the reforms appear to consist mostly of accounting changes, and will still leave the UK ...”

“... F.R. Leavis, as well as about Measure for Measure, which Leavis admired and which Wittgenstein may or may not have read or seen but was not predisposed to like. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Hawkes is merely engaged in a ludic ramble. He earns some of his jokes, and one of the best things about his books is that ...”

“... these criticisms. ‘Bloated and muddled’, Hofstadter calls Gebstedter, and many readers may agree. The book is long. It is a pot-pourri. It is repetitive. The structure is haphazard. These are fair criticisms, but they are criticisms which miss one essential point of what is new and interesting in the Hofstadter phenomenon. This is a quality perhaps ...”

“... in Piero’s native town of Sansepolcro in the middle decades of the 15th century, the style may have seemed startling, but the content surely did not. Even the angels, the one major feature not explained by the Gospels, would have been familiar from earlier representations of the story. In the past they had usually been shown praying or reverently ...”

“... are sliding down the league tables of national wealth, income, longevity and productivity. This may reveal only our low expectations – but it may do something to explain why the public is so hard to arouse in the cause of political and administrative efficiency, and why it’s myopic to lash out at Whitehall rather than ...”

“... change’. ‘I hope Syrian President Bashar Assad will consider reforms, otherwise he may say to himself: “I could be the second target,”’ Richard Perle told the Arabic newspaper Asharq al-Awsat in February 2003. As Washington sought to isolate Damascus, some Arab powers – especially Saudi Arabia and ...”

“... from Jefferson’s speeches to the rhetoric of abolitionism; even ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ may glance at an earlier line from the poem, about ‘starr’d and spangled courts’. In England, the Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus reached ordinary readers in a broadsheet version distributed free by the Society for Constitutional Information (it purged the ...”

“... response to the death of tonality, and to the death of ‘expressiveness’ it enacted. This may be my ignorance of music – I’m easily overpowered. With Richter there can be no such certainty. I cannot imagine a viewer emerging from the rooms at Tate Modern and being sure that Richter’s endless hovering around the fact of the photograph – his ...”

“... have been so alert to the medium’s cool tricking of the real and the abstract. Badlands may be the most serene film he ever made. A philosopher might have stopped then and there. But he was tickled by the idea of life as a moviemaker.His next film, Days of Heaven (1978), was more flagrantly beautiful and even more widely admired. It’s the story of ...”

“... unique educational value. Evensong has become more of a cultural icon than a religious event. As Richard Dawkins, no theist, put it, ‘I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.’But Stanford hadn’t set out to be only a church music composer. He had ...”

“... after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its ...”