“... literary registers. Abraham’s wife, Sarah, is for a long time barren, so she proposes that her maid Hagar sleep with Abraham to provide him with an heir. Hagar conceives, and when she sees that she is pregnant, ‘her mistress was despised in her eyes.’ It is one of those ...”

“... There is only one baby in The Man without Qualities. Her mother is Rachel, maid to Ermelinda Tuzzi who is the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, a bureaucrat in the service of the Imperial Austrian Government in Vienna. The year is 1913: Rachel was 19 and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards ...”

“... portfolio of amateur snuff photography, including still and video footage of the mummified head of her pet kitten. Morris quotes an Iraqi who described Harman as ‘one of the good ones’. The book humanises her, with frequent excerpts from her letters home. And indeed Harman, who would ...”

“... word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old Man River rumble in prose, a purple majesty. As the titles of his books indicate – Lie Down in Darkness (taken from Sir Thomas Browne), Set This House on Fire (John Donne) and Darkness Visible (Milton) – he strove for canonical grandeur and stature, never dallying in quick-buck genre ...”

“... the Shah of Persia. At a lavish ball, the Shah spots a beautiful Viennese noblewoman and requests her company for the night. A diplomatic incident is averted only when Captain Baron Taittinger, currently on secondment to the Court, proposes that another woman be substituted for the favoured lady. This other woman, who resembles the aristocrat, is a former ...”

“... the Essex Rebellion. The play concludes with the future Elizabeth I’s christening, during which her godfather, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, is inspired to prophesy:In her days every man shall eat in safety,Under his own vine, what he plants; and singThe merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:God shall ...”

“... VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah Jones has a slightly different version of the same story, like anyone who heard it from Clough himself. In his ...”

“... clauses that matter most. When Dryden tells us that Shadwell ‘seems designed for thoughtless majesty’, the accusation is intended to set up the dangerous and insubordinate simile that follows: ‘Thoughtless as monarch oaks that shade the plain,/And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign.’‘If a figure betrays itself, it ceases to be a ...”

“... he has decided to make himself the subject of a dramatic monologue. As Helen Vendler notes in her fine introduction to this edition, ‘he was – as he must have known – the first American poet to whom the discourse of the basic sciences was entirely natural,’ and that discourse brings with it a vision of the natural as a sign of the ...”

“... and sisters’? Until 1948 a British woman (not a man) who married a foreigner automatically lost her nationality and passport. The act immediately and retrospectively corrected that. (Though Patel does not go into this, the urgency came from the plight of the many young women, largely Scottish, who had married Polish soldiers during or after the war and had ...”

“... more professional over the course of the century, and the courtier-poet, reflecting dread majesty at a third remove, became obsolete. What went on around the literary edges of the court is one thing, though, and what went on in the public playhouses quite another, however the two worlds interpenetrated. Shakespeare, disappointingly, features in Lyric ...”

“... early life. ‘I believe no Man in the World was ever the Peoples King more than his present Majesty,’ Defoe wrote in 1697. His devotion to William spurred him to write The True-Born Englishman (1701), the work that, as Furbank and Owens put it with understandable hyperbole, ‘rocketed him to fame’. It was a scornful rejoinder to attacks on the king ...”

“... ages is like a fable, which on its way has the power to burst into flame. In the name of its awful majesty I will go down with willing torments into the grave.   I will go down, and rise again on the third day, and as boats float on the river, the centuries like a caravan of barges shall float out of the darkness to me for judgment. In representing Christ ...”

“... the First World War, Cécile Sauvage, Messiaen’s mother, threw herself into an affair with her editor, Jean de Gourmont, leaving Olivier and his younger brother, Alain, to be raised by their maternal grandmother. After de Gourmont left her for another woman, Cécile retreated to a room that, in Pierre’s ...”

“... Benjamin from Walter Brennan. Fascinated by Greta Garbo (‘I wanted to be Garbo,’ she wrote in her diary), Sontag managed to fashion a Garboesque mystique while carrying out the garrulous duties of a public intellectual for decades: speeches, interviews, conferences, symposia, all that gab. For much of its long, eventful haul, Moser’s Life resembles a ...”