“... 4’s In Our Time that he was in effect speaking French in English; and at a recent conference Elizabeth Archibald suggested that he was writing macaronics – those poems that combine two or more languages within a single verse form – only in a single language. Most of us will be most familiar with macaronics through a carol such as ‘In Dulci ...”

“... hypocritical’ making love, and perhaps worst of all the ‘obnoxious and joyless’ having sex (Elizabeth Bishop also despised that expression). ‘Your Name Which Isn’t Yours’ considers the effect of having a name capriciously bestowed on you at birth, something with which you can only fully reconcile yourself when you imagine it engraved on a ...”

“... who they were and what they were doing is unclear, but they were astute interlocutors and the king, soon to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, considered good relations a means to an end. Charles exhibited the golden treasures the Totonacs brought with them in Brussels town hall, where they were seen by Dürer. ‘In all the days of my life,’ he said, ‘I ...”

“... is cut up like a bullock at Smith field,’ he merely commented that he had now seen a king beheaded and that king avenged. Many other sights were to drive him to anger or disgust, but in this entry he was being studiously hard-boiled, as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 ...”

“... in public discourse. And there’s plenty of that silencing still going on. We need only think of Elizabeth Warren being prevented a few weeks ago from reading out a letter by Coretta Scott King in the US Senate.1 What was extraordinary on that occasion wasn’t only that she was silenced and formally excluded from the ...”

“... man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles ...”

“... the death of Louis? Couldn’t he have intervened to arrest the chain of events that had led the king inexorably to the guillotine? In the summer of 1792, with the Austrian and Prussian armies massing on the borders of France, threatening to invade in order to restore Louis to all the ‘legitimate authority’ he had exercised before the Revolution, the ...”

“... wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing knee breeches when meeting the king, except MacDonald, who was ‘very dignified and distinguished in his Privy Counsellor’s full dress uniform’. When MacDonald died in 1937, Channon said he had been happy ‘only after 1931, when he had carted his old followers, and could breathe freely ...”

“... III of Richard II, Bolingbroke and his party confront Richard at Flint Castle in Wales: See, see, King Richard doth himself appear, As doth the blushing discontented sun From out the fiery portal of the East, When he perceives the envious clouds are bent To dim his glory, and to stain the track Of his bright passage to the Occident. The Duke of York ...”

“... combines politics with reflections on the place of education in public life. In one play the King of Navarre is whimsically transformed into a bachelor and rechristened Ferdinand; he retreats from court not for fear of Spanish-funded Catholic plots but to lead a quartet of abstemious students. He experiences a crisis of conscience at breaking an ...”

“... wife, whose name has never been recorded, had died, leaving him four children. His second wife, Elizabeth, courageous and pious like his first, presented a petition to secure his release. Angered by the callous attitude of one of the Justices of the Peace, and by the mockery of several bystanders, she denounced the proceedings: ‘Because he is a ...”

“... iv) in a review by Kingsley, Ricks notices the witty conflation of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the King Charles spaniel in I ix – but others are of real significance. Ricks doesn’t cite Tennyson’s revealing comment that the narrator’s belief in the innate patriotism of the commercial classes (‘For I trust if an enemy’s fleet came yonder round by ...”

“... is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from ...”

“... it about right. It was pretty motley to be a sort of Jacobite (‘It was a’ for our rightfu’ king’), and also a sort of Jacobin (‘a perjured Blockhead and an unprincipled Prostitute’ was his comment on the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette). Again, mourning Scotland’s loss of independence and praising the British constitution are none ...”

“... which needless to say never got written. Firbank rather than Wilde. Geoffrey played Warren, the king’s doctor, in the film The Madness of King George, with Cyril Shaps as Pepys, who set great store by the king’s motions. ‘Oh the stool, the stool,’ said Warren. ‘My dear ...”