“... on the great altar of Notre Dame, hoping that news of its existence would thus reach the King and make it more difficult for his enemies to suppress it. But when he entered Notre Dame he found that his way to the altar was barred by a grill he had never seen before. He felt that Heaven itself was collaborating with the iniquitous work of men and he ...”

“... as much of the medieval Alexander, the fictional hero of romantic tradition, as of the ancient King of Macedon. At the moment of his discovery, the impact of America was absorbed in layers of his own reading and made to fit his capacious image of himself. Like the artist who showed Cortés riding into Mexico on an elephant, he accommodated his vision of ...”

“... invited his friend Isherwood to join him in Berlin. Thirty-five years later, in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind, Isherwood wrote: ‘To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.’ But in the same book he also points out that Auden ‘had now begun to write lines which are like the slogans of a psychiatric doctor about to ...”

“... to say that this is where our understanding of Vietnamese history sat before the appearance of Christopher Goscha’s magnificent volume. Goscha draws on the increasingly sophisticated postwar scholarship that wore away at those shibboleths. With the country closed to the non-communist world until its embrace of market-oriented economic reforms in the ...”

“... at New Delhi is in part one of frustration. He could treat the Viceroy and his lady, and even the King, as distinguished private clients, but the job was not his alone and the decisions were in some degree collective ones. Sir Herbert Baker, who was responsible for the Secretariat buildings, and always had a book of poetry rather than a sketchbook in his ...”

“... ceramic tiles. I’ve seen few things as beautiful; you could build a wall in them and outdo a king. Scott must have known that almost nobody would ever see them, but their presence is a bold and lovely fact. There are, too, flourishes built onto the walls, constellations of bricks like the work on the side of a cathedral, up near the top and too high to ...”

“... Andrew took up with the 19-year-old Princess Anne: Tyrrel borrows from another royal biographer, Christopher Wilson, the speculation that ‘it was to Andrew’ that Anne ‘surrendered her virginity’. It wasn’t that Camilla was worried he might marry Anne (Andrew was Catholic and therefore out of the question) but that he had bagged the most ...”

“... 1688 and 1776 and admits some oppositional Tories and some capitalists to a share in virtu. Christopher Hill supplies an engaging and suggestive piece on radical pirates after the Restoration; Wilson Hays offers an interesting study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas ...”

“... on such a scale that ‘crusaders rode in blood to the knees and bridles of their horses.’ Christopher Tyerman quotes this twice, in full and slightly abbreviated forms, noting that the chronicler was inspired by Revelation 14.20: ‘And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood came out of the winepress, even to the horse ...”

“... in his twenties, so it was natural enough for reviewers to notice the fact of his youth. The awful Christopher North patted the young poet on the head, praising ‘a promising plant’ while deploring an ‘infantile vanity’ (‘I forgave you all the blame,/Musty Christopher;/I could not forgive the praise,/Fusty ...”

“... know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king and of a king of England too’), yet how unlike it all was to the home life of our own dear Queen. Even 20th-century feminists have complained that, apart from declining to realise herself fully as a woman, she did ...”

“... in favour of the ‘miracle of peace’ which, to our acclaim, Arafat, Rabin, Shimon Peres and now King Hussein are supposedly bringing about. What hope, anyway, did these Palestinians ever have of recovering homes they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman and Amos Oz, have written eloquently ...”

“... more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an antiquated system of common law and rationalised a diffuse system of mercantile law; he drafted statutes; he played a central role in politics as cabinet member, counsellor and confidant; he knew everyone from Boswell ...”

“... the reflection? In a new study of English popular religion based on ecclesiastical court records, Christopher Haigh finds that Dent’s four characters represent widely held attitudes. While Dent invented them as useful stereotypes, his book succeeded because people recognised them and the things he had them say. Court records and books like Dent’s can be ...”

“... consequences. And one by one I began capturing his pieces … I checkmated him, knocked over his king, though I was well aware what this might cost me. But this was the moment chosen for me, this was my moment, there was no way anyone could take it from me, and I believed that, whatever happened, I was once again a human being. That day, I reclaimed my ...”