“... for instance, against such inconsistencies as were implied in making out Alexander the Great to be King Solomon’s general. But chronology was also an aid to those who wished to incorporate ancient myths into their histories, by methods honest or arcane. Accurate chronological reckoning was seen as a mark of high civilisation, with something of the same ...”

“... In 1989, François Furet was frequently hailed (or criticised, depending on the context) as the ‘king’ of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to be everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, and adorning the pages of almost every glossy magazine. Foreign reporters featured him in pieces on the celebration ...”

“... expansion. There were also rumours of a non-Christian ally in the East, the ‘grand khan’ Christopher Columbus had hoped to find in the Indies. Many Jews believed that the Lost Tribes of Israel – who were thought to inhabit an independent Jewish state somewhere beyond the Muslim lands – would rescue the Sephardic Jews in their exile.For a while it ...”

“... a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’. A century later in his how-to-be-a-king book, the Basilikon Doron, the versifying James VI of Scotland claimed that he had ‘not spared to play the bairde against all the estaitis of my kingdome’. When James boarded the English throne in 1603, his Scots had to be translated for English readers ...”

“... of elegies for the dead interspersed with similes, and pares away almost all narrative elements. Christopher Logue’s dazzling paraphrases adopt a fragmentary form which appears to have been broken apart by the violence it represents, which is often grotesque (‘His neck was cut clean through/Except for a skein of flesh off which/His head hung down like a ...”

“... of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an ...”

“... remembered my name without making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at ...”

“... to all but the most learned: label-names. Anglo-Saxon names by contrast were mostly transparent: King Aelfraed sounded like ‘King Elf-Counsel’, Lady Aethelflaed ‘Lady Noble Beauty’, King Aethelraed ‘King Noble Counsel’. Ancient Greek names ...”

“... on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as moles. The King spoke of his nephew the Kaiser planning to land an army corps and proclaim that, as a grandson of Queen Victoria, he was ready to free the King from ‘the Socialistic gang which is ruining the country’; Parliament voted ...”

“... punishment any more (except for Islamic fundamentalists and those Christian evangelicals who think Christopher Hitchens will go to hell), but the concept of an afterlife is still hard to throw over. The other day, my parents told me of an ageing friend who had recently abandoned his lifelong atheism and become a Christian. He told my parents, both churchgoing ...”

“... to the unconverted, a more specialised activity, goes by a different name: missionary work. Christopher Isherwood harboured a certain amount of rancour towards the majority, but disciplined himself for the missionary purposes of A Single Man, where his mouthpiece George is in mourning for a dead lover, and so benefits from the status of honorary ...”

“... features of the election.) Taylor Branch, later the outstanding biographer of Martin Luther King, remembers the dying days of McGovernism very clearly. The Texas Democratic Party was riven with faction, and generally uninterested in the pro-civil rights and anti-war position taken by the young volunteers from up North. More time was spent in ...”

“... The crucial moment is when Deirdre, who has rejected a future of wealth and position with an old king in favour of true love with a young warrior, angrily overhears her lover’s prediction that when she is old he will cease to love her – a circumstance which leads to his death at the hands of the man she has deserted and her suicide. Despite Deirdre’s ...”

“... when ‘on an island to the north and west that is unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who defeated a king of Norway is defeated by a Norman duke.’ Khayyám’s work on cubic equations remains fundamental. It seems it was a sideline, versifying. Composing quatrains was a cultured pastime, just as the Heian ...”

“... to elope. After this the quest for a respectable husband became urgent. It settled on William King, later earl of Lovelace. The marriage was based on real affection and was a considerable success for some time, although the bride of science made no secret of the fact that she found children, including her own, boring. ‘The less I have habitually to do ...”