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“... an account of de Clérambault’s most famous instance, a French woman who was convinced that King George V was in love with her and believed, among other things, that a slight twitch of the curtains at Buckingham Palace was a signal to her. Enduring Love has a case-study of Jed in an appendix, complete with professional jargon and not entirely fake ...”

“... to suggest that Macbeth, crazed and ambitious as he is, even as he contemplates the killing of his king, can still represent a more ordinary human disarray among matters that are too large, too consequential for us. Alert too to see that Shakespeare represents this case not only dramatically but also through his character’s choice of an individual word. But ...”

“... two further, later novels, not in the sequence, called O How the Wheel Becomes It and The Fisher King. The Powell offered to us here, in the pre-title list of his books, is the author of a nine-volume sequence of novels called A Dance to the Music of Time, and a further four-volume sequence called Books to Furnish a Room.The attraction of the slip is ...”

“... Such crude correlations are, of course, easily misleading. But a recent econometric study by Michael Sarel (admittedly published in that notorious hotbed of irresponsible radicalism, the IMF Staff Papers) argues on the basis of cross-country evidence that inflation appears to have quite different effects when it is low and when it is high. Sarel ...”

“... Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a goatish sales rep, to the fruits of Buddhism. It is late in the day. Elsewhere assignations are arranged, faces stuffed, drinks swilled ...”

“... little ease’ for his disobedience to its commands. Witherley applied to the court of King’s Bench in London for a writ of habeas corpus so that they might investigate the reason for his detention. The court issued the writ, but nothing happened. So it sent a second writ addressed to the jailer, Hunnyngs, along with an attachment for contempt ...”

“... was, also by coincidence, a study of a single royal event. This was Mass-Observation’s study of King George VI’s coronation in 1937 – May 12. Two hundred ‘observers’ were posted about the country and instructed to note what they observed: with the exception of those who kept a record of what they themselves felt, they were not to intrude or act as ...”

“... history, but real venom is reserved for Edward III: Southampton burned by the Genoese, and the king, like his father, ‘For want of a professional fleet ... for ever three months behind the enemy’, the only English response to naval threat being ‘to impose compulsory archery practice and ban football: an admirable measure, but no substitute for a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Martin Loughlin arguably gets it in one: ‘By establishing the principle that acts of the king had an official character exercisable through certain forms, the charter constituted a landmark in the emergence of English governing arrangements.’ What followed was, as he says, messy. It took a long time for king and ...”

“... often with non-publishing or foreign management at the highest level. Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Frederick Warne and Longman – all once imprints with independent identities – now congregate within the Pearson group (best known for its ownership of the Financial Times). Random House UK (whose American parent was long since swallowed up by ...”

“... safer with a fifty-year-old President. Other stock characters are borrowed from fiction, notably King Solomon’s Mines, which D.M. Thomas read with interest when he was a small boy in Australia. Like other boys, he wondered what sort of quarterdeck language Commander Good used when he was swearing at Zulus and whether he responded erotically to the devotion ...”

“... of politics, where decision making is the main topic of study, continue to think in state units, Michael Lynch’s big single-volume history of Scotland must take the foreground for anyone who wishes to know about the country and its past. It is a distinguished achievement, covering from the earliest records to the present day the story of a country still ...”

“... Iran. These missiles, said the prosecution, never existed. The four men, three arms-dealers called Michael Aspin, Eric Matson and John Taylor and a Lloyds underwriter called William Harper, were tried at the Old Bailey in early 1988. Aspin, Harper and Matson were found guilty and sent to prison – Aspin is still inside. Taylor was acquitted. Aspin, who was ...”

“... be kept green against the possible arrival of the men in white coats. 19 January. Watch a video of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the first time, I think, that I have watched it all the way through since I saw it as a child at a cinema in Guildford. Then its particular interest was that the village scenes featuring the local doctor ...”