“... it’s fuzzy, sometimes it’s a matter of perspective. Does my daughter believe that the king is the head of state? Well, does that require her to distinguish the state from the government? Or that she understand how the United Kingdom differs from Great Britain? Determining what someone believes is often more like determining whether Hamlet is an ...”

“... the document which was to prove the beginning of the end for any hope of autonomy. The French king agreed to recognise Haiti’s independence only if the new republic paid France an indemnity of 150 million francs and reduced its import and export taxes by half. The ‘debt’ that Haiti recognised was incurred by the slaves when they deprived the French ...”

“... in heaps to lie. Behold I have destroyed a thousand men With this same worthless ass’s jaw. As Christopher Hill has pointed out, The Pilgrim’s Progress was written in jail at almost exactly the same time as Milton, imprisoned by blindness, was composing Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Bunyan was, Hill noted, the first major English ...”

“... launches into a description of the poems he hopes to write in the future, which include an epic on King Arthur. A Latinist as good as Milton might remind us (though his editors curiously do not) that the single usage of ‘turgidulus’ in classical poetry means something like ‘welling up with tears’ rather than ‘turgid with self-regard’. But once that ...”

“... in D’Olier Street while he presented himself indecently to the instrument in the callbox’. In Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), the homosexual Baron Kuno von Pregnitz, pursued by the police on charges of political corruption, locks himself in panic into a cubicle in a public lavatory. Next day, the newspapers uniformly report him ...”

“... Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which ...”

“... demandingly, how it avoids invalidating itself. This shows up the advantage of the philosopher-king model, which can at least base its method of reaching political decisions on the philosophers’ claims to know best. Matters are made worse by the leaden style in which Between Facts and Norms is written. If poetry is what is lost in ...”

“... Magdalene’ is a black comedy about furious turn-over in an old people’s home. Leonard Deane-King combines Science Fiction and fairy-tale in ‘Good Intentions’ – a story which will appeal to admirers of Spielberg’s E.T. – when Chaz and Len find a friendly Martian in the backyard. Mark Illis’s ‘Loomis’ describes an encounter in Eastern ...”

“... Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that no future monarch could break it? The political loyalty of bishops was always conditional, after the Reformation as before. That loyalty had looked doubtful in the ...”

“... their majesties’ heads onto bodies sketched out in conventional Islamic fashion, converting the King Emperor and his consort into something very different from their squat Anglo-Germanic selves. Even when British aesthetics were imported into colonies wholesale meanings shifted. Thomas Metcalf remarks that the Parliament building in Ottawa, like ...”

“... hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake finishing his game of bowls and Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle, they all belonged as much to folklore as to history; and folklore, so far as enlightened opinion was ...”

“... Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the ...”

“... emotionally as well as intellectually. Who would not sympathise with the long-serving priest Christopher Trychay, trying amid the upheavals of four reigns to hang on to his parishioners, his income, his integrity and his vestments? The people of Morebath do not seem to have been eager for reform, or change of any kind. In Duffy’s view, the reign of ...”

“... jazz club stands). Within a few days Wolfgang and Nannerl had been granted an audience with King George III and Queen Charlotte, but their trip was very nearly derailed when Leopold contracted a throat infection that left him bedbound for weeks. With all concerts cancelled for the duration, Wolfgang was able to concentrate on composition for the first ...”

“... process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies. On the opening day, the conference director, Christopher DeMuth, responded that he had ‘communed’ with the ghost of the Iron Lady, who had let him know that she was ‘on board’ with the circus of flag, family and nation. When the proceedings began, the agenda was dominated by wokeness. Woke schools ...”