“... wilderness – sometimes presciently, as on Germany, sometimes ludicrously, as in support of the King over abdication – without getting back into office. From young man in a hurry to old codger going nowhere: his hour on the stage of history seemed to be over. If anything, Ramsden goes further than Rhodes James. In itself 1940 was not a lasting ...”

“... of the martyrdom of Stanislaw Szczepanowski, Bishop of Krakow, who had stood up to the tyrannical king Boleslaw the Bold and paid for it with his life. Szczepanowski is a kind of Polish equivalent of Thomas à Becket, except in his case, so the legend goes, the king was unable to find anyone to carry out the deed and ended ...”

“... intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as ...”

“... laws by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Leading the protests was Martin Luther King. In the aftermath of the Montgomery bus boycott, King established the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, using black churches as the base for organising protests. During the 1955-65 period, what historians call the ...”

“... slow, but the separate clusters of power created a system of checks and balances. When the current king, Salman, made his son, Prince Mohammad, crown prince last year, he flipped the succession vertically, from father to son in his own line. The new monarchy is absolute. Today’s Gulf rulers have more in common with Saddam Hussein’s bullish totalitarianism ...”

“... just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the rightist nationalists of the Irgun and the Stern Gang waged a fierce campaign against British forces and the Arab population, provoking an increasingly harsh and ...”

“... appropriate career of a mercenary. By 1579, when James, at the age of 13, made his formal entry as king into Edinburgh, Montgomerie was there to write two poems that clearly were meant to accompany pageants. For the next few years he was a court poet and apparently, in a very minor way, a favourite of James, who gave him a pension of five hundred marks in ...”

“... a political right. The experience of military rule in the 1650s persuaded most Englishmen that a king who had his own army would be able to impose taxes without Parliamentary consent. If the people were to be free, the sovereign must be disarmed. But the nation must be able to defend itself against invaders, so a volunteer army made up of county militias ...”

“... upper stratum’. Capitalist and romantic utopian, man of action and wouldbe philosopher-king, bon viveur and advocate of austerity, Rathenau is perhaps the most contradictory figure in this book. A key organiser of German raw materials in the First World War, and attacked by the Allies as the despoiler of Belgium, Rathenau became a postwar symbol of ...”

“... a decent-sized natural history museum) is an adventure story of the kind Rider Haggard devised in King Solomon’s Mines and She, as an alternative to the English novel’s stuffy domestic preoccupations. Green Mansions is an eco-romance: She with added insect ecology (Haggard wouldn’t have got out of bed to describe anything smaller than a ...”

“... the Old Regime but nourished by some spectacular betrayals, not least the attempted escape of the King, who had sworn an oath to defend the Constitution. By the summer of 1792, furthermore, France was at war, and disguising one’s true beliefs or appearance became doubly criminal, intensifying an already fraught atmosphere of suspicion and denunciation. The ...”

“... royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King could not be directly blamed for these upsets, those who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began ...”

“... time a coup in Egypt has been called something else: Nasser and the Free Officers who overthrew King Farouk in 1952 also called their coup a revolution. What’s different today is that the most ferocious critics of coup-talk are people like my friend, veterans of the 2011 uprising against Mubarak. Their insistence is understandable: having brought down ...”

“... there, in a sense.’ ‘Perhaps we should think about Scotland in the same way,’ the playwright David Greig said. ‘Perhaps Scotland has always been independent, but we were just unable to see it.’ Where is Scotland, anyway? That question isn’t about geography. Where does it exist most intensely? In football? In culture? In the past? In its music? The ...”

“... Earnest sadposts. Thirst traps. A bulging man who eats raw organ meat and calls himself the Liver King. A woman who whispers to you that you are a Mesopotamian artefact she is restoring. And I haven’t even mentioned the porn. Where is the corresponding fiction? Most of the recent works cited as examples of ‘internet novels’, such as Lauren Oyler’s ...”