“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... the age of 38, he was appointed Hofmedicus und Medicinalrath, or court physician, to the king of Saxony, and began writing accounts of his travels around Europe as part of the Saxon court, along with four long volumes of memoirs. He was awarded a prize by the Institut de France for his work on the circulatory system of insects. He seemed to excel at ...”

“... and turns against the architect of the match, Thomas Cromwell, who is beheaded on the very day his king marries Katherine Howard, niece of Cromwell’s arch-enemy the reactionary Duke of Norfolk (who in Mantel’s version resembles an ungenial version of Sir Ector in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone). As Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, puts it in The Mirror ...”

“... to that honour, consequence and independence, which European laws studied to uphold.’ In 1848, John Mitchell Kemble, in one of the top three, assured (reassured?) Queen Victoria that ‘woman among the Teutons was near akin to divinity, but not one among them ever raved that the femme libre could be woman.’ On the other hand, some scholars (few of whom ...”

“... life by dying in a good cause in Greece) and who considered his confessions to be, in the words of John Cam Hobhouse, ‘fit only for a brothel’. Mr Nye’s book is an exercise in literary reconstruction, and hence in the revision of a character. It traces the career of our ...”

“... worships’, because ‘he assured us he seldom did anything without consulting it.’ The giant King of Brobdingnag had a different perspective: Gulliver must ‘be a piece of Clockwork (which is in that country arrived to a very great perfection)’. Any acute 18th-century reader of Swift would easily make sense of these timely jokes. Britain was then ...”

“... kept shouting, “If you let this man go, you are no friend to Caesar; any man who claims to be king is defying Caesar” ’ (John 19.7). Since the 18th century, however, it has been argued that this allegation of a ‘frame-up’ is itself a frame-up – whose victims are the Jews. If Jesus, as many Gospel passages ...”

“... Indian soldiers won the Victoria Cross. Many letters make the point that their loyalty was to the King personally, and express great contempt for the German Emperor, although it may well be that these are sentiments picked up from a prevailing climate of British opinion. The 127th Baluchis, whose trenches were only a few yards away from the German lines, took ...”

“... in distressed companies and undervalued shares (one of Wilbur Ross’s nicknames is ‘the King of Bankruptcy’). The shares are: £260 million W.L. Ross, £50 million Virgin Money, £50 million Abu Dhabi investment fund. You’d be forgiven for noticing that those numbers don’t come close to £747 million, so where’s the rest of the ...”

“... Then, on 24 May 1915, it declared war on Austria-Hungary. The decision was taken by the king and a minority of the cabinet, without the approval of parliament, after secret meetings in London at which the Entente powers promised that, in the event of victory, Italy would be able to annex the regions of Austria-Hungary largely populated by ...”

“... There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916) As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April ...”

“... and Portugal, and the new kabbalistic ideas coming from the school of Isaac Luria in Palestine. John Freely’s lively book is basically a retelling of Scholem’s story enriched by the author’s knowledge of the Ottoman background. His one significant addition to Scholem is his suggestion as to where Sabbatai might be buried. Freely has omitted all of ...”

“... in 1991; Lamar Cecil needed two books to capture the life, the second published in 1996. Now comes John Röhl, with the first of three projected volumes. Wilhelm himself, to whom modesty was always a mysterious idea, would doubtless have been pleased by the thought of a thousand-page doorstopper devoted to his youth. It is unlikely that he would have enjoyed ...”

“... the least distaste or disaffection or complaint or clamour of his people”, and the King’s own expressed belief that the forest laws were for the benefit of his subjects as well as himself should not be read as disingenuous’. Laud’s claim to ‘have resolved in handling matters of religion to leave all gall out of my ink’ is not useful ...”