“... the modern world as being devoid of authority and over-supplied with electric power plants. The King of the land of Ho (the Confucian term for harmony) has lived to regret the ploughing-up of his truffle-forests and bogle-fens to make room for an enormous power-station. Another of Barthelme’s narrators looks on with unconcealed envy at two old ladies ...”

“... the anger of Southern governors or segregationists in Congress. Mistrustful of Martin Luther King and keen to keep the civil rights leader at arm’s length from the president, he lapped up Hoover’s claims that King had ties to the communists. But King, a discerning judge, always ...”

“... could claim the distinction of being a seyyid, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. (The current King of Malaysia is of the seyyid Jamalullail family.) A few families tell dramatic tales of shipwreck, slavery, recognition and marriage to the princess. Most married at less exalted levels, sometimes wives of different ethnic origin, in different places of ...”

“... The most riveting moment in Bermant’s book records an exchange between Argov and Sir Michael Palliser, who was permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office when Thatcher became prime minister. Argov told Palliser that Israelis saw Carrington (and maybe Palliser himself) as characteristic of the old English elite, whose disdain for the Jewish ...”

“... round and supporting Grey. A few weeks later Lloyd George shocked both A.J. Balfour and the King by suggesting that, as ‘Germany meant war,’ it might ‘be better to have it at once’. In explanation of his volte-face Professor Gilbert writes that for Lloyd George: international understanding was preferable to war ... Yet the principles of ...”

“... opposition, an elegant William Pitt rides the shoulders of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive ...”

“... his foe, and ran the drama happily through in his mind. A few weeks later the newsreels showed King Alexander of Yugoslavia being mown down by a Croatian assassin on exactly that spot. ‘I felt oddly guilty, but also pleased. In the Mediterranean sunshine there were strange and violent men with whom I could identify, and with whom, in a way, I was now in ...”

“... They are large and fierce and hungry, and they are on their way from Oran as a present to the King of Spain. It’s true that they are not really an adventure in Quixote’s sense, and that he has no business having them released so that he can fight them. But equally there can be no doubt of his extraordinary courage in facing them and it’s hard, as ...”

“... of erasure through which – by order of the Protestant Duke of Somerset, the lord protector of King Edward VI, who was a minor – the occupants of the St Paul’s charnel house were consigned to symbolic oblivion. If charnels had once served as ‘a kind of waystation for the dead as they made their slow progress from this life to the next’, this ...”

“... to the city. There he was determined above all to visit the house in which the ambassador of the King of Persia lived. He had the vague hope that he might somehow find a clue there.’ This is typical in its over-emphasis. It’s a perfectly ordinary moment in the story, which needs one or two functional sentences, not ‘above ...”

“... of liberation’ were sung. There were cheers for ‘the People’s Strindberg’ and ‘the King of Poets’. No moment illustrates more clearly the complexities of Modernism. The militant workers with their torches were acclaiming the very type of the accursed poet and immoralist: moreover a self-conscious member of the ‘aristocracy of ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... the Phoenician alphabet, Champollion and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Magnus Celsius and Staveless Runes, Michael Ventris and Linear B, Edward Hincks and Akkadian cuneiform, Yuri Knorozov and Maya glyphs. These were undeniable intellectual achievements. They were also endeavours tinged with madness. How else could anyone persist with such fiendishly difficult ...”

“... to clamber round the intricate corridors of another octagon, the very strange Red Mount Chapel in King’s Lynn, which seems to be some 15th-century Norfolk pilgrim’s effort to reproduce either the tangled claustrophobia of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the outward appearance of the Dome of the Rock, which Christian tour-guides in Jerusalem ...”

“... 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the ...”