“... of the World’s Longest Biography rather than of the World’s Greatest Statesman. From Stephen Ambrose, the indispensable Eisenhowerist who naturally writes of the WSC-Eisenhower relationship, to Philip Ziegler, the tactful Mountbatten biographer who does for WSC and the monarchy, the contributors cover almost every imaginable WSC facet and ...”

“... activity, and hence to make it more humane. The villains of the book are Bertrand Russell and Stephen Hawking. Russell is presented as an ‘iniquitous’ apologist for science (why does that man still bring the word ‘iniquity’ to so many lips? He can’t be all bad, if he continues to prompt that description). Hawking is said to have stated, in an ...”

“... and by his constant procrastination when it came to working on projects – an edition of King Lear, a life of Stephen Crane – that might have provided the basis for financial security. Nonetheless, Simpson looks back on them with clear sight and affection. Her marriage to Berryman was wrecked by his unsteadiness ...”

“... The overthrow of the awful Edwardians, the triumph of Bloomsbury over the Kensington of Leslie Stephen, were unmitigated joys. Lehmann, who published her first novel, Dusty Answer, to sensational acclaim in 1927, smoked, danced and divorced her way through the interwar years with gayer abandon than most. During one particularly frank sexual discussion at a ...”

“... and personal prerogatives, hardly receives a mention. Even if, reductively, one saw the king merely as a cipher of the ruling class (surely an unacceptable view), the changing constitutional and political powers of the crown demand Marxist analysis. The limitations of Thompson’s rather swashbuckling vision of the Hanoverian state as a parasitical ...”

“... if one says – and nearly every reviewer says this kind of thing at least once a week – that King Lear is a good play and The Four Just Men is a good thriller, what meaning is there in the word “good”?’ His real beef was that too regular, too poorly paid employment could turn good reviewers bad. Cut to the present day: ‘In a cold but stuffy ...”

“... with samples of ointments used in Guinea. Sloane also obtained an Asante drum, which, as J.C.H. King reports here, is the only surviving 18th-century African artefact associated with slavery. David Dabydeen has pointed out that the very word ‘patron’ could at this point mean both connoisseur and slave-owner. It would be intriguing to know whether the ...”

“... wrote a fulsome poem for the front of the book, paid for its publication, presented it to the King, and reviewed it in the Royal Society’s journal, which he himself edited. He made a profit of at least £10 out of the sales of the book. Few others got a look behind the scenes of this amazing work. Its impenetrability, and that of its author, became ...”

“... points out how repetitive the rhetoric of development planning over the decades has been. In 1876, King Leopold II said that his goal for Africa was ‘to bring civilisation to the only part of this globe where it has not penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops entire populations . . . a crusade worthy of this age of progress’. In 2005, the ...”

“... aesthetic peccadillos. He is traced mainly through his lengthy projects as Surveyor-General of the King’s Works, the chief office he held from 1669 until his late, peremptory dismissal at the age of 86 in 1718. Thus the biography sometimes turns into a catalogue of building designs, from university commissions such as Trinity College Library to the host of ...”

“... bills’ being pressed into his hand, his wardrobe filling with ‘clothes appropriate to meet a king’, which he did, in Spain, at the Zarzuela Palace. Newsom doesn’t pretend that frolicking with the Gettys awakened in him an early sensitivity to inequality or the unfairness of the American tax code. He seems to have been a personable jock, taking ...”

“... crisis’, which can only be alleviated one bad actor at a time. In tone​ , if not in argument, Stephen Smith’s Scramble for Europe belongs to the crisis literature that began to appear in 2015 after Merkel’s decision to allow more refugees into Germany than EU burden-sharing rules required. The notion of a ‘European refugee crisis’ had already ...”

“... Street, which I do regularly, I hardly ever think about Leopold Bloom and the Kilkenny People or Stephen Daedalus and the ghost of Hamlet’s father, even if I decide to walk the route down Kildare Street and past the National Library. I studied in the National Library almost every weekday between 1973 and 1975, and it is easier to wonder who stole my yellow ...”

“... for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide.Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as normal or exceptional. It is, for example, perfectly true to say that the ...”

“... And, 4. She had an outcry. Then the Interpreter compares the hen to God, whom he calls ‘your King’. The comparison speaks to ordinary experience, as does this paragraph in Grace Abounding: But God did not utterly leave me, but followed me still, not now with convictions, but judgments; yet such as were mixed with mercy. For once I fell into a creek of ...”