“... prerogative rights; and it would give rise to ‘republican’ classics in the writings of Milton, James Harrington and Algernon Sidney. Hobbes’s three major works of political philosophy, The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, were designed, Skinner tells us, in direct opposition to parliamentary and radical writers. As the conflict between Parliament ...”

“... explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and generosity, has been to draw their conclusions together and to set them in perspective. But the findings which count for most are the author’s own. To the non-specialist ...”

“... long ago pointed out, decide that this was the perfect time for him to sell his share in the King’s Men, simultaneously funding a comfortable retirement and avoiding paying a portion of the bill for rebuilding the playhouse. Instead of getting involved in the fuss and cost of reconstruction, according to this narrative, Shakespeare contributed just the ...”

“... is holding a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times, which reports details of the Rodney King trial. Now for all I know, George is so devoted to South Central LA that he holds a weekly acting workshop in Lynwood, but if he’s anything like most of the Anglos in Los Angeles, he is happier contemplating the minutiae of its native movie business than ...”

“... and ‘Independent’ in the old carefree way. Three years later followed The Reign of King Pym, a masterly study of Parliamentary politics during the early years of the English Revolution which has dominated historical thinking ever since. In 1952, he published More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea, a competent but not epoch-making work. Since ...”

“... to consider the many aspects of France’s colonial history. Pierre Singaravélou, a historian at King’s College London and the book’s editor, is in no doubt about the difficulty of his task: ‘France and its former colonies … laid down arms only to continue the war in history books, political forums and the media.’ The book’s format has its roots ...”

“... the Lancelot of the revolutionary set I came from afar just to say ‘Bonsoir’ Tell the king ‘casse-toi’. Who’s the best? C’est moi.He cuts the British off at Yorktown, then leaves for France to ‘bring freedom to my people if I’m given a chance’. Lafayette was born in Auvergne in 1757, into a junior branch of an ancient noble ...”

“... politics. Lee says only whites ask him about the meaning of the two quotations, from Martin Luther King and Malcolm, at the end of Do the Right Thing, and only whites need to ask, he claims, why the uncommitted character played by Lee himself chooses to start a riot by hurling a rubbishbin through the window of the pizzeria. The quotation from ...”

“... in the market at Kiev. He was not unlike the old gardener who waxed eloquent on the virtues of the King Edward potato, adding perfunctorily that it was not ‘an eating potato’. Henry James would have seen the point. In 1870 he wrote to his elder brother William from Malvern, England, where the hotel fed him mostly on ...”

“... Factory and to Stavros Niarchos’s yacht with its Degas, Delacroix and Toulouse-Lautrecs, its ‘James Bond’ features and 17th-century olive-wood panelling? Who else was an object of some interest to Mick Jagger, François Mitterrand and Greta Garbo, to Gorbachev, Judy Garland – ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’, ‘Rudi’, ‘Judy’ – and François ...”

“... not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a dragonfly over the reeds,’ she wrote in The King Must Die (1958). She was inspired to write that book after seeing the original on a visit to Evans’s fanciful but thrillingly evocative reconstruction of the House of the Axe at Knossos in 1954.She left Oxford in 1928. Her parents expected her to return ...”

“... rebellion; and that the target of such rebellion was the specifically ‘Anglican’ sovereign of King-in-Parliament born during the English Reformation, confirmed by the Restoration settlement, and pronounced mature after the Glorious Revolution. In the context of the British Atlantic world, the American Revolution was accordingly a ‘rebellion of natural ...”

“... Marías writes the kind of old-fashioned, speculative prose we associate with Proust and Henry James, all qualifications and revisions, no assertion that can’t be infinitely embroidered or unravelled. But he also deals in violence, historical and personal, and in the movie titles, politicians, brand-names and underwear we connect with a quite different ...”

“... of William Blake intoning ‘Ah, Sunflower’ to him ‘like God had a human voice’. James Campbell, who introduces a note of irony into his reworking of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate illumination as ‘hand-held’ – perhaps an allusion to a key detail in what he had said to me: the fact that an act of ...”

“... in a London gallery, there’s more to it than a shared interest in contemporary art, as Henry James explains with just a faint smack of the lips. ‘It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp deep fact she saw it, in the oddest ...”