“... instead. It was, to be sure, easier to make these claims of, say, Rainer Maria Rilke than of Anthony Trollope, not to speak of Shopping and Fucking. Like most theories of art, Romanticism and its heirs privileged one particular form of it – in this case, poetry, which had taken up where religion had left off. As I.A. Richards remarked with stunning ...”

“... with the consent and approbation of his master’ and ‘Samuel Baron, son of the African King, Oaramby, alias Johnson’. Two sides of the African presence are revealed here. First, there was a subculture of slave ownership by white masters, although this was illegal under the common law. Newspapers often printed ‘for sale’ or ...”

“... with one occasional diarist, setting out from the memorial to Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king, sited where the high altar of Waltham Abbey once stood, for a five-day tramp to another heritage marker at Battle Abbey. And on, strength permitting, to the marble effigy of the slaughtered English warrior who is cradled, in serpentine embrace, by his lover ...”

“... wilderness – sometimes presciently, as on Germany, sometimes ludicrously, as in support of the King over abdication – without getting back into office. From young man in a hurry to old codger going nowhere: his hour on the stage of history seemed to be over. If anything, Ramsden goes further than Rhodes James. In itself 1940 was not a lasting ...”

“... anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of rock’. How far this prudishness in the public culture was mirrored in private life is hard to gauge, but Kynaston presents enough evidence to suggest that ...”

“... I decided I would stop concealing that myself.’ On 1 October 1969, aided by his Rand colleague Anthony Russo and using a primitive Xerox machine in the office of Russo’s friend Lynda Sinay, the owner of a small advertising agency, Ellsberg began his monumental task. Working through the night, he and his friends would copy 47 volumes of the Pentagon ...”

“... unknown for the prime minister not to chair Cobra when he or she is in London. According to David King, the former government chief scientific adviser, Blair and Brown never failed to chair a Cobra meeting. Johnson failed five times in a row, always on the subject of Covid. The reason isn’t far to seek: he didn’t understand it and didn’t take it ...”

“... more than enough to set alarm bells ringing about US imperial intentions. It is remarkable that Anthony Eden agreed to join in with the Suez operation, for it meant deliberately deceiving the US and undermining the Anglo-American alliance. The French warships that were secretly in Israeli ports had to be kept out of sight of the US Sixth Fleet in the ...”

“... K’ang-Hsi, a contemporary of Louis XIV (although by K’ang-Hsi’s imperial standards the Sun King was a mere barbarian princeling). The book is not a biography but a portrait, indeed a kind of self-portrait, an attempt to explore K’ang-Hsi’s mind by making a kind of jigsaw or mosaic of the Emperor’s personal opinions, which are to be found ...”

“... Vol. 6, No 2 of the London Review of Books, we read of similar beliefs in 17th-century Italy, when Anthony Pagden discussed The Night Battles by Carlo Ginzburg. Hearing of this night life in the Ivory Coast, Naipaul was reminded of the beliefs and customs of black slaves in old Trinidad. ‘A king of the night, a slave by ...”

“... the spirit of the Protestant apprentice boys who had shut the gates of Derry in the face of King James. This retrenchment had the effect of removing from Protestant identity the level of political allegiance and negotiation. Any reform was, and still is, construed as an immediate threat to fundamental values. Addressing an Ulster Unionist Convention in ...”

“... or Schröder of Eastern Europe, but his failed modernisation project – supposedly inspired by Anthony Giddens – and bribery scandals involving both socialists and liberals, led people instead to equate the left with capitalism and corruption. Every Saturday, menacing groups of men, young and old, dressed in black would gather outside parliament to blast ...”

“... world. One might think that with all this a modern biographer couldn’t help but succeed, much as Anthony Everitt recently succeeded with Cicero, the Roman orator who seemed to Plutarch to have been fashioned by Nature as a duplicate of Demosthenes the Athenian. It’s not as easy as that, however. Nearly everything said about Demosthenes by his ...”

“... of Charles II, and though one would be hard put to find much resemblance between the ‘Church and King’ Tories and the rabble who contested the leadership of the Conservative Party last year, it is without question the most successful political party in modern European history.Sometimes it has been a force of reaction, in the spirit of Lord Salisbury, a ...”

“... were beginning their work, there appeared in print a brief Oriental story about three sons of the King of Serendip, who could tell the identity of a lost animal simply by reading its tracks. Tried as wizards, the three brothers successfully demonstrated the method they used and escaped punishment. The same story was told in the 18th century, prompting Horace ...”