“... 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 ...”

“... life, anyway, offers diversions. There is an affectionate portrait of another fellow conscript, Peter Stanford, who feels as passionately as Philip does about books and music and painting. More particularly, they feel the same way about writing. Writers were spies and interpreters who could undergo hardship and excess and emerge from the ordeal with ...”

“... reform don’t draw public attention like the toppling of a statue, and the RMF leaders know this. Peter Scott in the Guardian called the removal of the statue the ‘easy option’ and a ‘displacement activity’ that distracts from the real issues. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone would be talking about Oxford’s colonial past, or racist present, if ...”

“... to the evidence of three people who worked in or close to Intelligence in the mid-Seventies – Peter Wright, Cathy Massiter and Colin Wallace – a substantial section of MI5 was working almost full time to disorientate the office, and subvert the political achievements, of Prime Minister Wilson, allegedly the one man in the country who could control ...”

“... and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the ...”

“... of them rejected all historical applications of psychoanalysis as inherently unreliable. Yet as Peter Gay has aptly pointed out, insofar as every historian operates with a theory of human nature, every historian is inescapably an amateur psychologist. The choice is not whether to use psychology or not, but whether to borrow the insights of professional ...”

“... thanked her for it, writing from Chequers ‘in his own hand’. In his 1970-74 diaries Cecil King records a warm relationship between his wife, Dame Ruth Railton, and Edward Heath. ‘I think he is fond of her,’ he wrote on 6 March 1971 after Ted had been round for tea, ‘and finds the friendship of an intelligent and musical woman, with no possible ...”

“... Upon Don Quixote and Rhenanus’s adaptation of Tom-kis’s Lingua) and illustrations (the elder Peter Breughel’s Mascarade D’Ourson et de Valentin as well as the younger’s Village Fair), so that the old points emerge with new emphasis. The second half of the book gives critical readings of The Spanish Tragedy, Mucedorus, Edward II, Dr Faustus and ...”

“... as in the jeering lyricism of the scene where Thetis calls together her sister Nereids, ‘kith of King Nayruce’ (Nereus). War Music is an abridged and telescoped version of Iliad, 16-19, the first major block of a larger substructure which runs from Book 16 to the end at 24, and which deals with the linked episodes of the slaying of Patroclus by Hector and ...”

“... Jackanapes in Prating Alley (1693), articulates satire through imaginary titles such as Near is my King, but nearer is my Skin (‘to be sold at the Sign of the Jack-Pudding’); A Dissertation of the No Power of a No Parliament, making a No King, that will always be doing us No Good; and A New-invented Mathematical ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... first words to the policeman who wrestled him to the ground were: ‘Did I get him, did I get the king?’ His defence counsel Thomas Erskine, the Whig MP who had faced down Pitt’s government in the treason trials of 1794, disputed none of the facts but argued for dismissal even so. Hadfield had been under the illusion that he was God’s instrument, and ...”

“... the Anglo-American appetite for dirt. He had known for a while that an American biographer, Dean King, was on his case, and had told his friends to give King nothing. But Fenton’s and the BBC’s revelations forced King to show his hand in a piece for New York magazine, a speculative ...”