“... later Elizabethan churchmen had viewed the Presbyterian threat and the prospect of a Scottish king as head of the Church of England, but there was less need for nerves after 1604, when the esteem of bishops seems to have risen among the laity. The troubled Parliaments of the 1620s produced no challenge to the episcopal office. If the term ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader.Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of ...”

“... for her mother’s work, was born in 1957, a year after Brophy published her second novel, The King of a Rainy Country, an ‘autobiography or fake autobiography’ in which young Londoners take a road trip to Venice (it will appear from McNally Editions next year).Murdoch was supportive of Brophy’s books, which is more than you can say of Brophy, who ...”

“... And what will the succession be?People tell you in Grimsby there was only one power: that fish was king, and that it didn’t abdicate, it was overthrown by foreigners. Once, the world’s largest ice factory would turn out gargantuan ice blocks to be crushed by the ton, carried on conveyors to the dockside and poured from chutes into the holds of the ...”

“... container of the autobiographical narrative form. Aldiss, to simplify brutally, killed for the King in the jungle and now lives quietly in Oxford. How can such diverse phases of a life ever be brought into single focus? Joseph’s experiences in the East are recorded in a series of letters which his detective brother reads, vaguely intending to write a ...”

“... Exequy’, which is patterned on the 17th-century poem of the same title in which ‘Bishop King/Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme/His young wife, lost before her time.’ Porter’s poem begins by acknowledging separation, remorse, confusion and affection: In wet May, in the months of change, In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange Dreams pursue me ...”

“... the ruck of political preferment is itself a symptom of the ideology. One who plays Flimnap to the King of Lilliput is Anthony Giddens of the LSE. Writing a while ago of the cosmically vacant notion of globalisation, he remarked that ‘a million dollars is a lot of money for most people. A stack of [presumably one ...”

“... foreigners with his high status. He returned to a troubled England, where his patron the king was already thinking of a new marriage which would provide him with an heir. In 1529, on a visit to the Sorbonne, Pole made the case to the university for Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and made it successfully; it was a success he would later ...”

“... which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear ...”

“... all round the country, and the entertainer who had been spirited away somewhere between King’s Cross and Leeds had swarms of aspiring sound-alikes as far as the BBC transmitters could reach. The story of his disappearance made headlines in the national papers the following day. Posters went up in shop windows, and Peter Brough offered a reward of ...”

“... it stands, would you believe it, for flawed character. It is with some relief that one turns to Anthony Glees’s Secrets of the Service. Glees is a professional historian and rightly attempts to place British intelligence operations in the context of the twists and turns of British foreign policy. In so far as it is possible, Glees has been meticulous in ...”

“... a phase of ‘improving’ the imperfect Shakespeare, as for example in Nahum Tate’s version of King Lear, which allowed Cordelia not only to survive but to marry Edgar – a much more ‘satisfying’ result. And the 19th century produced one of my favourite ‘prequels’, Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, which offered the ...”

“... writing more than the market would bear from any one name. In ‘straight’ fiction one can cite Anthony Burgess as someone who has borrowed this downmarket technique. In the famously productive year of his death sentence – having been misinformed that he had a terminal illness, and wishing to provide for his family – Burgess was driven to the expedient ...”