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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... calls the root word – in this case, look – a ‘key word’, and registers it at the end of her commentary on each sonnet. The couplet tie which she also prints at the end of each commentary, of course contains the key word. So far so necessarily technical, but let us see how it applies in practice in her discussion ...”

“... June 1764: Commodore John Byron sets sail in HMS Dolphin, HMS Tamar accompanying, to visit ‘His Majesty’s Islands call’d Falkland’s and Pepys ‘Islands situate in the Atlantick Ocean near The Streights of Magellan in order to make better surveys thereof, than had yet been made, and to determine a place or places, most proper for a new settlement or ...”

“... had hidden under the sofa. A Jeeves before his time, Manners imperturbably laid a place for His Majesty on the carpet and put down the plate. He was retiring discreetly when the King said (still sous bergère), ‘That was very good … Manners.’ The pun was thought to signal a further stage in the King’s recovery. The anecdote hasn’t found its way ...”

“... to lines by Goethe, which his mother often quoted, ‘written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him’, as though it were the most natural and ordinary thing in the world for Carlyle to have given a book to his mother. But the most significant passage comes shortly after he has been given the news of ...”

“... bent on preserving heroic dignity even in defilement, as in Pope’s ‘Slow rose a form, in majesty of Mud.’ Oldham’s nearest Augustan analogue is in Swift, who declined the ‘lofty Stile’ and the elevations of mock-heroic, and whose aggrandisements, like Oldham’s, tended to unruly forms: Rabelaisian enumerations, hyperbolic extermination ...”

“... by section 9(3), which provided that the Act was to ‘continue in force until such date as His Majesty may by Order in Council declare to be the date on which the emergency that was the occasion of the passing of this Act came to an end, and shall then expire’. The Act gave the executive wide powers to regulate exports without any Parliamentary ...”

“... surrounding them. But some of them still lay awake at night, as Mary Rowlandson did, reflecting on her past torments and ‘the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us’.A sanitised version of the captivity narrative, shorn of Rowlandson’s reflections, became the official story of post-9/11 America, as constructed by its leaders: the American people would ...”