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“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... daughter of that legendary debauchee, Maurice de Saxe, who’d in turn been a bastard son of the King of Poland. So in George Sand, née Aurore Dupin, the Ancien Régime was crossed, give or take a bar sinister, with the Paris proletariat, and once she was grown up, and France had gone back to having a king, she could in a ...”

“... was intertwined with his. It would be helpful to have explanations of Lucy Porter, Hill Boothby, John Taylor and the Thrales, as major figures in Johnson’s life and letter-writing. The notes are self-referential in a cryptic way, with a delicately archaic use of ante and post; these are not as helpful as the editor thinks, for the reader who is reading ...”

“... sacrifice of his participants very low, and they spectacularly fail to clear it. An incompetent king spawned a needless crisis that was then worsened by his narrow-minded, self-interested opponents. No one wanted the war but it lasted more than ten years and nothing good came of it: ‘It was a hard war to idealise.’ Once the parliamentarians, who held ...”

“... a group of whom, on the day the bishops were acquitted, invited William of Orange, the king’s Protestant son-in-law, to invade. James panicked and tried to reverse some of his reforms; but William, alarmed at the possibility that Louis XIV of France would soon have a militant ally in Britain, crossed to Torbay in November 1688 with a force of ...”

“... you accord him the ultimate homage, and become an Elvis impersonator, remaking yourself as the King right down to the Queen Bess high collars and the heel-shaped sideburns the size of Italy; or else your favourite Elvis story will be the one in Albert Goldman’s biography, of how he nearly drowned in a bowl of minestrone soup – so bombed out one day on ...”

“... Unlike their late 20th-century descendants, contemporary Englishmen knew what that meant: an adult king, of the right religious persuasion, and with a family. Fifty years of that abnormal phenomenon, petticoat government, 45 of a monarch without an heir, and, more immediately, ten of the gloom and doom caused by a sterile war, economic distress and mounting ...”

“... as something of a surprise to remember that thirty years before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot ...”

“... bred that hearty Race of Mortals who won the Fields of Cressy and Agincourt . . . The Renown’d King Arthur is generally looked upon as the first who ever sat down to a whole roasted Ox (which was certainly the best way to preserve the Gravy), and it is further added that he and his Knights sat about it at his Round Table, and usually consumed it to the ...”

“... Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth Pope, H.N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch, c/o Lord Godmanchester (Gumster), The John Peelcroft Hadmanchester Podgoets, Night Slide Clubb, P.O. Box 1AA, BBC-wise, W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these cartoon-rubber composites. In the Robert Lowell version actually used by the Sunday Times, ‘Spleen’ opens: I’m ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... as the family banquet on Christmas Eve, the visit to the Sick Children’s Hospital to hear the King’s speech through the PA on Christmas afternoon, and visits to wealthy patients of my father’s some way up the twin river valleys from Aberdeen, I might well have run away screaming, tearing off my Graham of Montrose kilt and matching trews (tartan ...”

“... classroom-based teaching with online learning’. The new model has been piloted at Ark’s King Solomon Academy in the Borough of Westminster, and Ark staff have travelled to the US to visit the ‘reknowned [sic] Rocketship schools’. Rocketship Education is a chain of charter schools – publicly funded but privately managed – in ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr ...”