“... is a reissue of a 1963 version of the 1905 original, with the addition of an admiring preface by Margaret Atwood. A play, Gertrud, was filmed by Carl Dreyer; Doctor Glas has also been filmed; I don’t quite understand why these books and others of his – Martin Birck’s Youth, from 1901, and castigated, on its appearance, for being ...”

“... Dr Rabelais thinks of real men in real wars, a ‘tyrant’ such as Charles V, who ransomed the King of France, is condemned and the once-comic figures who egged Picrochole on are treated as ‘seditious’ (a sin as well as a crime) and made to toil in the printing-presses; the wounded are nursed back to health. Rabelais came to see joyful laughter as a ...”

“... person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation. Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of ...”

“... Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that no future monarch could break it? The political loyalty of bishops was always conditional, after the Reformation as before. That loyalty had looked doubtful in the ...”

“... Lutyens created a retirement house, the charming sketches for which are elegantly reproduced in Margaret Richardson’s delightful little book. The singlemindedness with which Lutyens sought his élite commissions, and the certainty with which he told his clients what he would give them, explain much of his success in the first phase of his career, in the ...”

“... wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing knee breeches when meeting the king, except MacDonald, who was ‘very dignified and distinguished in his Privy Counsellor’s full dress uniform’. When MacDonald died in 1937, Channon said he had been happy ‘only after 1931, when he had carted his old followers, and could breathe freely ...”

“... courtroom intrigues, confession, retraction and, above all, an irresistible femme fatale, Mrs Margaret Caroline Rudd. Perhaps an innocent and wronged victim, but more likely a cunning manipulator of everybody around her (particularly men), she alone walks away from a disaster, seemingly of her own making, that leaves everyone else confused, injured or ...”

“... of 10 Downing Street has been the target of so relentless an onslaught at his hands as Mrs Margaret Thatcher. Now, with all the zeal of a Dickensian prosecuting attorney, he summarises the case he has deployed for so long, and sadly to so little effect. It is his contention that she has misled the House of Commons on a string of issues, most notably in ...”

“... the Puritan in him into a purist, turned moral rigours into stylistic precisions’. Margaret Iverson discusses Hopper as a self-consciously melancholic artist. She suggests that his monumental painting Hotel Room of 1931 (one of many key works missing from the Tate’s show) makes an allusion to Rembrandt’s Bathsheba with ...”

“... primarily functions through the operation of conventions, which regulate such matters as whom the king chooses to be prime minister and the accountability of ministers to Parliament. The relationship between Parliament and the courts is similarly governed by conventional principles of comity and restraint. In R (Wheeler) v. Office of the Prime Minister in ...”

“... was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s King John at the Theatre Royal, which boasted an ‘Attention to Costume never before equalled on the English Stage’. A playbill for a production of Shakespeare’s ‘King John’ in 1823. The century before Scott’s ...”

“... when the search for Franklin began, and 1859, when M’Clintock discovered some grisly remains on King William Island, almost thirty naval and overland expeditions joined the search. A writer has to juggle the names of explorers, famous in their day, but now known only to Arctic buffs, such as John and James Clark ...”

“... Corelli and Ethel M. Dell, but not Glyn. Two thick Companions to Literature, one of them edited by Margaret Drabble, give her 13 lines between them. Chambers Biographical Dictionary snortingly dismisses the Glyn output as ‘nonsensical, high-falutin, faulty in construction and ungrammatical’, qualities which were never a bar to popular ...”

“... for a cabinet post, Rosina wrote to the prime minister, Lord Derby, denouncing the pair as ‘one King of Sodom and the other King of Gomorrah’. Terrified of what might emerge in a divorce hearing, Bulwer-Lytton consulted six doctors, all of whom agreed that Rosina was insane. He did nothing until June, when he was ...”

“... to carve out a corner of a foreign field three thousand miles away in Chesapeake Bay. James I, king during the Jamestown experiment (the plantation was named in his honour), was similarly minded to give his blessing to overseas projects only if they didn’t cost him anything. Everything was done on a wing and a prayer. The joint stock companies on which ...”