“... coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female line a senior claim ...”

“... He is a real person. I met him once and talked with him. He was amiable and decent, or distant.John Bleasdale’s The Magic Hours is both a monument to unstoppable research and, in the end, an admission that even such a thorough inquiry can remain inconclusive. Bleasdale hasn’t been able to talk to Malick, or to his family. But he has interviewed some of ...”

“... dismissed magic as fraud and delusion. From the early Christian church came the bogus levitator Simon Magus, a cautionary tale that endured for hundreds of years. His name links him to the priesthood of ancient Persia (and the wise men at the Nativity) but in the High Renaissance ‘magus’ came to mean a worker of occult marvels, using powers that in ...”

“... of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness displayed by John Thadeus Delane, editor of the Times, in his famous exchange with Lord Derby over the accession to power of Napoleon III 28 years earlier, and serves to show that, even if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted ...”

“... in writing a novel about Parliament relates to the characters’ credibility. Trouble begins, as John Lehmann once pointed out, when the author feels obliged to introduce a high-ranking minister. The real-life holders of office are too vividly before our eyes. Camp surmounts this problem by avoiding it. He opts instead for a recent past in industrial ...”

“... The collection edited by Peter Quennell has some attractive photographs and two good essays, by John Bayley and Martin Amis. For the rest, there is a lot of laborious exegesis, which might have amused the recipient of the tribute, and a thought-provoking piece by Alfred Appel Jr, who knew Nabokov well and is steeped in his work. The thought provoked is that ...”

“... the Russell-Coteses had collected, such as James Archer’s Henry Irving as Charles I (1873) and John Collier’s Lewis Waller as Monsieur Beaucaire (1903), were really very fine. I had also begun to feel defensive about genre painting, which seemed to be eminently respectable when executed by 17th-century Dutchmen but was otherwise bafflingly taboo. Was it ...”

“... a monopoly of printing. In 1588 the anti-episcopal Marprelate Tracts (one of whose authors, John Penry, was executed for publishing them) provoked a system of press licensing which survived in one form or another, though with diminishing effect, until the last decade of the 17th century. The first thing that should be said about the current controversy ...”

“... by Tarquin: not the uncertain-looking, girlish Lucretia portrayed by Artemisia’s colleague Simon Vouet, nor Guido Reni’s grave classical beauty with one hand casually resting on the dagger, but a mature woman with a substantial physical presence, capable and gripped by determination. She looks as if she’s really going to do it.The National ...”

“... theoretical issues. One would hesitate before saying that the work of Marx, Schumpeter or Herbert Simon was ‘nothing’, and the ‘sophisticated practitioners’ referred to above would certainly not make any such judgment. Yet they would tend to say that their writing, though not lacking in insights, is amorphous, their ideas unformalised and ...”

“... the empire which the Communists enlarged. In a sharp essay on the Union’s dominant nation, Simon Dixon observes that the Russians tend both to see themselves as superior to the other Soviet nations and to believe that they have given these nations everything at the cost of having their own wealth drained. Russian nationalism, he believes, even in its ...”

“... When John Muir, the son of an emigrant from East Lothian to southern Wisconsin, was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water ...”

“... home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as ...”

“... There is,’ John Lord Campbell observed in his multi-volume, Mid-Victorian Lives of the Lord Chancellors, ‘no office in the history of any nation that has been filled with such a long succession of distinguished and interesting men as the office of Lord Chancellor.’ A roll-call which included such illustrious history-makers as Wolsey, More, Bacon and Clarendon lent some credence to Campbell’s hyperbole ...”

“... last years. The best-known part of Kelley’s story concerns his long partnership with the magus John Dee. It begins with his arrival at Dr Dee’s house, in the Thameside village of Mortlake, near London, in early March 1582. Dee, then in his mid-fifties, was the Queen’s chief consultant on all matters occult. He was renowned as a ...”