“... Phillip and tries to convince him they’ve lived together in a series of past lives: a medieval king and queen, a pair of nuns, an elderly couple in the 1940s, a prehistoric twosome with apelike features. (‘Do you see where I’m going?’ ‘Kind of? In that I see you’re talking about cavemen who look like us.’) She fantasises about her boss’s ...”

“... Cowper came to me and said: “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? … You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – mad as a refuge from unbelief – Bacon, Newton and Locke.’ ” Thus William Blake’s memo of a ghostly visitation from William Cowper. But how aghast Cowper would have been at the words put into his mouth! Blake revelled in his own prophetic ravings, soaring free from the mind-forged manacles of the rationalist trinity into the aether of mysticism and insight ...”

“... The Tory donor Christopher Moran, at 259, who only has £620 million, £20 million more than King Charles, is the owner of the Chelsea Cloisters, better known as ‘ten floors of whores’.Whether you’re a steel magnate or a lottery winner, you want to be bigger than the guy next door, and that kind of culture, though not new to Britain, had never ...”

“... Mona Lisa Overdrive; for the classic citations in Cole Porter’s ‘You’re the Top’, Nat ‘King’ Cole’s ‘Mona Lisa’ and Bob Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’; for the spliff-smoking poster and the novelty mouse-pad. Personally I suspect that I first became aware of the Mona Lisa through the Jimmy Clanton hit of c.1960, which began: ‘She’s ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... to Rupert Murdoch’s Times, Worsthorne’s first reaction was that it was like choosing to be King of Ruritania instead of King of England. But Sir Perry has built his career on telling us that the country is going to the dogs. So after mature consideration, he began to feel that Mr Dacre’s choice wasn’t just a ...”

“... In the​ First Book of Kings (5:1-5) Hiram, King of Tyre, sends servants to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars which were about him on every side, until the Lord put them under the soles of his feet ...”

“... Eliot was firing off letter after letter dotted with doggerel detailing the sex-capades of ‘King Bolo and his Big Black Kween’, while producing poem after poem whose energies derive not just from the distancing irony but also from the unexamined ambiguity of their author’s feelings towards the social and sexual problems incarnated in the ...”

“... The​ king died and then the queen died’ is a story, as E.M. Forster told us long ago. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. Another plot, a little more reticent about causality, would be: ‘The king died and the queen married his brother ...”

“... humanation of a god’. But St Matthew makes it clear that the Magi had come to see the new-born King of the Jews. They had no reason to doubt that the baby was human, so if the old Magus was really doing what Steinberg supposes, it could only be to satisfy himself that the child was not a girl. In his discussion of such paintings Professor Steinberg makes ...”

“... wisdom. I wonder what kind of pragmatic compromise the president would have urged Martin Luther King to make with the segregationists in the South? After putting aside the Sunday papers after lunch and peeking out of the window at the snow beginning to fall, I closed my eyes in my chair and concluded that clearly there hasn’t been enough misery in the ...”

“... Aragon, and the Aragonese empire in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean, passed to the Habsburg Charles of Ghent, who had also inherited from his grandfather, Maximilian I, most of what is now Central and Eastern Europe, together with the Duchy of Burgundy, which included modern Holland and Belgium. This huge territory was tied together, as most of the ...”

“... an air of the sublime. A third candidate for revaluation, Claudio Coello, was a favourite of Charles II’s and is best-known for his group portrait in the sacristy of El Escorial, La Sagrada Forma, which shows the King kneeling before the miraculous host of Gorkum, which had shed blood when profaned by the Protestants ...”

“... the Life and Writings of John Evelyn, trumpeted as an eyewitness account of life at the court of Charles II. It was often less than thrilling – ‘21 June, 1653. My Lady Gerrard, and one Esquire Knight, a very rich gentleman, living in Northamptonshire, visited me’; ‘23 June, 1653. Mr Lombart, a famous graver, came to see my collections’ – but was ...”