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“... reader. The title may suggest a Qumranic fantastication, or something like Robert Graves’s King Jesus, but Lane Fox’s purpose, though ambitious, is sober enough. He offers an ancient historian’s view of the Bible. This is ‘a book about evidence and historical truth, not about faith. It is unauthorised because it addresses questions which the ...”

“... earlier, in 1611, in a decision known as the Case of Proclamations, it had been ruled that ‘the King by his proclamation or other ways cannot change any part of the common law, or statute law, or the customs of the realm … The King hath no prerogative, but that which the law of the land allows him.’ It gave a key to ...”

“... of the announcement: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.’ For the older generation, Princess Margaret was the unlucky princess. She was our Diana: capricious, passionate, vindictive, doomed to fall in love with rotters, the breakaway royal who hung out with actors and rogues and who was frozen out by ...”

“... ill, he was carried on a litter to the Hotel de Ville to acclaim the advent of the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe – who appointed him to the Conseil d’Etat, and gave him 200,000 francs to pay off his gambling debts. He died in December 1830, aged 63, too soon to witness the disappointments of the new regime. His funeral cortège, led by the ageing ...”

“... Frederick the Great), paintings of modern life, including scrambling crowd scenes – Departure of King William I for the Army (1871) and Supper at the Ball (1878) – and still-lifes, including studio interiors. Supper at the Ball, of which Degas made a copy from memory, has no focus at all – only a sea of bare backs, lace, gold braid and dark uniform ...”

“... in order ‘to protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of ...”

“... but in such a way as to make him think of something entirely different: Freud, Kafka, King Hussein, 19th-century photographs, the Rothschilds. Return to Agate’s little essay on Olivier as Macbeth. After his heavy chunk of old Archer, he swings into his modern world of 1936: Perhaps this is the place to say – and if it isn’t I shall still ...”

“... whose glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the personal empathy and enthusiasm ...”

“... would end in marriage. It did not. She married instead a 30-year-old advertising copywriter called Peter Porter. He was an Australian immigrant in London, and had written a lot of poems, but published relatively few; she was a nurse who seemed ‘very English’ in accent and tastes, and was admired for having a figure like a ballet dancer. They set up home ...”

“... Griffith. Tyson’s record as a boxer is now becoming a liability to himself and the promoter, Don King, whose silver hair stands reverently to attention as the dollars file towards him in their solemn millions. The problem is simple: Tyson can no longer command a big gate, since he is likely to put his opponents away within a couple of rounds and send the ...”

“... material. You only had to look around and speculate – for example, on a film poster in which Nat King Cole is airbrushed from his seat and the blonde white singer left standing beside the piano without an accompanist. The idea was to entertain, raise spirits, to report on the talent pouring out of the townships, the energy, the razzmatazz, the musicians, the ...”

“... with a short biography, in the recently reissued In ‘Vanity Fair’, by Roy Matthews and Peter Mellini).* When she was 20 she was painted by G.F. Watts, who was besotted with her and called her his Bambina. At the height of her notoriety she was caricatured in Punch and elsewhere. In her last days she had a deathbed photograph taken of herself, all ...”

“... addressed his fable to ‘kings’. The taloned hawk, who gets his own way, clearly represents the king and the melodious nightingale the poet. Far from being mere child’s play, then, the fable was a variety of wisdom literature, with wide dissemination and deep roots. The earliest surviving written texts, from Sumer, in southern Iraq, contain a number of ...”

“... 1688, but also to a more recent revolution that historians tend to overlook: the 1772 coup by the king of Sweden, described by the Annual Register (of which Burke had earlier been editor) as ‘one of the most extraordinary revolutions … which we can meet with in ancient or modern history’. Burke agreed: ‘The Court may assume as uncontrolled a power in ...”

“... rather than a high-spirited goof. Empire of the Senseless, In Memoriam to Identity and Pussy, King of the Pirates gave the impression that Acker lost interest in books long before she’d finished them, and that her pastiche technique of assembling a novel reflected boredom rather than some scheme further to undermine literary form. She saw no point in ...”