“... sky; His be yon Juno of majestic size, With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes. As Kathryn King observes in the first full-length biography of Haywood for almost a hundred years, these lines are straight out of ‘the well-stocked cabinet of misogynistic satiric conventions’, and they needn’t depict anyone in particular. Edmund Curll, the literary ...”

“... for instance, against such inconsistencies as were implied in making out Alexander the Great to be King Solomon’s general. But chronology was also an aid to those who wished to incorporate ancient myths into their histories, by methods honest or arcane. Accurate chronological reckoning was seen as a mark of high civilisation, with something of the same ...”

“... and largely as a result of circumstances beyond his control, he became a thoroughly popular king: a symbol, promoted in new kinds of official displays and celebrations, of a united Britain’s heroic resistance to the French, and a symbol, too, of a kind of domestic ordinariness and vulnerability which made it possible to believe in him as the father of ...”

“... the Lancelot of the revolutionary set I came from afar just to say ‘Bonsoir’ Tell the king ‘casse-toi’. Who’s the best? C’est moi.He cuts the British off at Yorktown, then leaves for France to ‘bring freedom to my people if I’m given a chance’. Lafayette was born in Auvergne in 1757, into a junior branch of an ancient noble ...”

“... Acts. Although confrontational, there was nothing unprecedented in the Lords’ vote and, as John Bercow, the Speaker of the Commons, has stated, no procedural impropriety. If the clamour were confined to Tory MPs it could easily be dismissed. But a gaggle of retired law lords, who now see themselves as constitutional guardians, also registered concern ...”

“... was not an act of God but an avoidable tragedy.These two submerged villages are central to Richard King’s oral history of Wales – or, really, of Welsh-language activism and Welsh nationalism – in the late 20th century. The injustices and catastrophes caused by the government in Westminster weren’t the only thing that stimulated Welsh activism during ...”

“... fashion, with a few feminist trimmings, is in the same tradition as Ruskin’s ‘The King of the Golden River’ (1850) where his fiercely-held political, aesthetic and ecological doctrines reappear in fantastic guise. In ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877) Mary de Morgan mounts a conventional attack on the conventional Victorian miss; and Frances Browne ...”

“... furnace and the smoky atmospherics which he calls ‘Gothic’. But the poem is dedicated to John Cowper Powys, whose Atlantis, one of his most eccentric novels, is cited as a source. As Fisher himself points out, A Furnace inherits Powys’s ‘Romantic notion’ that ‘the making of all kinds of identities is a primary impulse which the cosmos itself ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... liberties as an expression of royal weakness. The outpouring of royal charters under Richard I and John has traditionally been regarded as the equivalent of selling the ancestral silver for petty cash. Paradoxically, this reading derives from another aspect of belief in the feudal system. If a ruler’s power consists of rights deriving from the overlordship ...”

“... More particularly, he was the disciple who questioned the truth of Jesus’s resurrection. In John 20, the only gospel source for the story, he demands to see and touch the physical evidence of crucifixion – ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will ...”

“... in which family alliances would be less important, and the Annual Register rejoiced that the young King had ‘united all sects and all parties’. For the time being, however, the old ways prevailed and Burke had to do the best he could. He agreed to act as paid assistant and adviser to William Gerard Hamilton, chief secretary of the Lord Lieutenant of ...”

“... that the screenplay is by Pasolini, and so it is. But not in the same way that the screenplay for John Huston’s The Bible is by Christopher Fry, or for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ by Paul Schrader. Pasolini hasn’t really written this movie, he has made excerpts from the gospel and filmed them, either as images in the manner we have ...”

“... very well since. Kenneth Anger has been this kind of wallflower at the orgy for years. The dragon king of gorgeous Hollywood has him in thrall. His snappy chapter-headings (‘Closely Observed Blondes’, ‘Babylon Boozers’, ‘Hollywood Drugstore’) give a promise that is always kept. A sample from another chapter (‘The Magic of Self-Murder’) conveys ...”

“... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...”