“... The engraved frontispiece​ to the 1635 second edition of John Donne’s Poems features a portrait of the artist as an exceedingly young man. Eighteen years old, in loose curls, padded Italian doublet, a single cross-shaped earring and the optimistic hint of a moustache, Donne clutches an oversized sword by the hilt and gazes sidelong at the viewer from beneath provocatively arched brows, a study in adolescent bravado ...”

“... poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed Smith, Elder in 1917; between the wars, according to Ian Norrie, Hutchinson ...”

“... the jollity and schoolboy humour and comic French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI went to see it with Queen Elizabeth shortly after their accession; and a few months later old Queen Mary – a true Aunt Edna type – came, too. That evening a slight hush fell on the house when Rex Harrison described Diana the man-eater as ‘a ...”

“... pays off well: it makes a first-rate anthology. There are a number of poems, by Suckling, Henry King, George Farewell, Andrew Young, which will probably be new to the reader, and which will certainly produce ‘the illusion that it was written specially for me’. There are well-known favourites too, like Housman’s ‘Bredon Hill’ and Flecker’s ...”

“... flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead ...”

“... with insights and concluding with the happy suggestion that the song from Purcell and Dryden’s King Arthur, or the British Worthy: A Dramatick Opera would be the most acceptable substitute for our present National Anthem. Fairest Isle, all Isles Excelling,   Seat of Pleasures, and of Loves; Venus, here, will chuse her Dwelling,   And forsake her ...”

“... a rare false note in a learned and persuasive book. One final point. In a passing reference to King Lear, Greenblatt cites Kent’s valediction on the old man as: ‘He hates him/That would upon the rack of this tough world/ Stretch him out longer.’ Tough? It sounds like an absurd American misprint: Lear played by ...”

“... basic sociology of the SDP, I later realised, lay before me a decade before the event.Crewe and King might not wholly agree with this, for their view of the SDP élite which triggered the schism (and it was definitely a revolution from above) is far too friendly for them to enter into such cold sociological calculation. They are open about the fact that ...”

“... Simone’s singing broadcast not just a new sound but a new time. Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole – great black song stylists who emerged out of the 1940s and crossed over into the commercial white mainstream – succeeded precisely because their tone and diction took race out of their voices; they swung but without soul, which made the songs and ...”

“... of fortune flourished,’ says the cover flap of Frances Stonor Saunders’s biography of Sir John Hawkwood (c.1320-94), one-time leader of the White Company made famous by Conan Doyle’s historical novels. The 14th century was indeed an age of opportunity for military adventurers, and for mercenary soldiers in particular. Independent companies, led by ...”

“... with two unpardonable offences to the estate. Jack, as Stone asserted, was not in fact the son of John London. His true father, Stone claimed, was a vagrant, 55-year-old, incorrigibly bigamous ‘itinerant Irish astrologer’ called William H. Chaney. Chaney and Jack’s mother, Flora Wellman, had a tempestuous and unhallowed alliance in 1874-75, during which ...”

“... The Four Hundred (its distinctive symbol is a gold sovereign) and Harry Patterson’s To Catch a King (this title and its distinctive symbol are still to burst upon us from, once again, Hutchinson). The authors of these commercially outstanding novels have much in common professionally. All are British tax exiles. Forsyth lives in Southern Ireland; Sheppard ...”

“... Liberal deputy first elected in 1919, failed to oppose the confidence vote on the new government. King Victor Emmanuel III had capitulated to the fascists, but Amendola had faith in Italy’s constitution and the strength of its democratic institutions. Like many other members of the liberal coalition that fell when Mussolini took power, Amendola hadn’t ...”

“... instance, on the scaffold at Westminster 14 months later, on a cold January morning in 1649 when King Charles had his head cut off. Clarke carefully bound his record of the Putney Debates with all his other voluminous notes, and left them to his son George. George, a solid Restoration Tory, was also a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He quarrelled with ...”

“... exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her, ‘the confident, highly articulate woman with the dark flashing eyes’. It was the tempestuous love between Henry VIII and Anne, it’s said, that managed to topple papal power in England, and turn the country from Catholic ...”