“... voices and having visions. The conclusion of the Civil Wars and the imminent execution of the king drove him into a chiliastic frenzy in which he anticipated the Second Coming and the conversion of England into a paradise for saints. His visions were erratic and his millenarianism combined strands of two usually incompatible sets of ...”

“... febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II trembled at the sight of a naked sword: and the sight of an ass, if the chronicle of the time can be believed, sufficed to cause the Duke of Epernon to lose consciousness.’ Other stalwarts included Hobbes (fear of darkness), Pascal (fear of ...”

“... in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested ...”

“... a single non-royal person was common, even commoner than either genuinely personal monarchy, the king his own minister, or conciliar, collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who ...”

“... of four degrees of warming in which ‘Britain would be like Italy in the 1980s.’ Viscount Christopher Monckton then asked the audience if anyone thought net zero policies should be continued. Only a couple of hands went up. ‘You’re fired,’ he said.Corporate Britain has been cautious about coming over to Reform. The party still lags behind the ...”

“... in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of Eliot’s work by tracing every possible verbal overlap between the words used in his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts that ...”

“... having examined the child, claimed to have detected promise of mathematical genius. Moving on to King Edward VI Grammar School in Aston, Reed specialised in Classics. Since Greek was not taught, he taught himself, and went on to win the Temperley Latin prize and a scholarship to Birmingham University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his ...”

“... out of him. One of these was Robert Poley, the government agent who was present at the death of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford four years earlier. This was the first of many skirmishes with the authorities. In 1603 his tragedy Sejanus was denounced to the Council for ‘popery and treason’, and in 1605 he was in prison again, for the comedy Eastward ...”

“... office as prime minister, Colville, Butler and Chips Channon drank a champagne toast to the ‘King over the water’ – Chamberlain. Of all the appeasers, young and old, Colville was the only one to make the transition from Chamberlain’s inner circle to Churchill’s. The new prime minister took a liking to him, and he – like millions of others ...”

“... by his inability to observe them, as much as by the fact that in the new world no one else does. Christopher Sykes attributed Waugh’s dislike of Duff to sexual envy and jealousy, and John Charmley agrees that it exhibits Waugh ‘in an oddly unfamiliar light’. Waugh may well have been frustrated and made to feel small by not knowing what the Cooper ...”

“... the same time, it is controversial, for, to revert for a moment to the Stuarts, Dr Morgan has his King Charles’s head. He has returned from his investigations with an enthusiasm for the Coalition which bubbles through all his critical reservations. The standard view of the Lloyd George Government is that it was founded on pure expediency, and its ...”

“... with Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb and Milner) conspire with the Duc de Mersch (King Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur Granger, is an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist who betrays his own cherished chivalric ideals for the sake of a girl-agent from the Fourth ...”

“... prose again’. And this is also why Bentley’s Milton was the graveyard of his method. As both Christopher Ricks and William Empson recognised, Bentley had a remarkable ability to spot the poetically dazzling in Milton. The trouble was he would then emend it away. When Milton’s devils smelt gold from ore, Milton says they ‘scumm’d the bullion ...”

“... of the works published in his name: not Sir Francis Bacon, or Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, or Christopher Marlowe, living on in secret after his apparent death in a brawl in 1593 (before most of Shakespeare’s works were written), or one of the more than 50 alternative candidates who have been proposed since the mid-19th century. The case for Shakespeare ...”

“... de Viau. Atheists were of course blasphemers by definition, and we know from the charges against Christopher Marlowe that, like Théophile, they sometimes larded their tavern conversation with rather juvenile insults to religion – the Virgin was a whore, Christ was a bastard and St John was his bedfellow, and so on. It seems that one somehow needed to ...”