“... it with six thousand urns containing urine. Floating irresistibly back come recollections of John Nance Garner, Vice-President of the United States, describing his own job as ‘about as much use as a pitcher of warm piss’. John Nance Garner, where are you now that we need you? The bizarrerie that pleases me most is ...”

“... to Tariq Ali. Before my dismissal, I appeared on television to defend the paper against A.J. Ayer, John Gross and Colin Welch – with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile ...”

“... and distinctive achievement. Pinget has been reasonably well served by his English publisher, John Calder, over the years, despite the solecism of choosing the title Recurrent Melody for the almost self-explanatory Passacaille (published in French in 1969 and translated in 1975). In the recent past, however, the pace of Pinget translations seems to have ...”

“... among the most learned Brexiteers. In fact, they often go much further back than 1689. Sir John Redwood, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and long-time Tory MP for Wokingham, has invoked the Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533, quoting on his constituency blog (7 June 2012) its ringing claim that ‘by divers sundry old authentic histories and ...”

“... took his pulse in disbelief. Now, the monk’s mechanical likeness, commissioned by a pious king for an impetuous son, would offer similar testimony to the power of saintly bodies. The automaton resides today in the Smithsonian, reminding us of humanity’s long-standing desire to create life that survives death – an impulse once fulfilled through ...”

“... 20 July 1554 and married Mary Tudor five days later at Winchester Cathedral, where he was declared king ‘de jure uxoris’, though Parliament refused to let him be crowned, to his considerable annoyance. If Mary had borne him a son, there would have been a Habsburg dynasty in England. Unfortunately, her ghastly gynaecological difficulties, which may have ...”

“... one 140-character tweet at a time. The bare bones of the central story are these: the five sons of King Pandu, called the Pandavas, were fathered by gods: Yudhishthira by Dharma (the moral law incarnate), Bhima by the Wind, Arjuna by Indra (king of the gods) and the twins by the Ashvins (the Dioskuroi). All five of them ...”

“... Brought before Pharaoh’s Daughter’ (1736) ‘Hannah Osborne, Daughter of John Ranby’ (c.1747-50) detail of ‘Captain Thomas Coram’ (1740)PreviousNext In a thoughtful essay Lamb himself attacked the notion that what is most Hogarthian about Hogarth is what is most broadly comic, most boisterous, most fun. This, he claims, is ...”

“... be able still to be crowned to Handel’s anthem ‘And Zadok the Priest ... anointed Solomon King’. But future Archbishops of Canterbury would presumably have to jostle for space in the ceremony with representatives of the country’s other faiths, with Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. And what of the Princess of Wales? Part of her continuing ...”

“... be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the parliamentary coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal power.In 1685 the Duke of York, who had been ...”

“... One night in 1130, King Henry I had a nightmare. He dreamed that he was being attacked, first by a crowd of peasants, then by a group of knights, and finally by a number of clerics. For many historians, this detail, recorded by the chronicler John of Worcester, would be no more than a fascinating piece of useless information ...”

“... tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on.’ Two months earlier, Roe described a durbar held in Burhanpur by Jahangir’s son, Parvez, as being akin to ‘a great stage’, with Parvez seated like the ‘mock ...”

“... Tudor writers​ made being a court fool sound like a holiday. In John Heywood’s play Witty and Witless (c.1520s), ordinary working men are said to live with great ‘payne of body’: they strain their muscles ‘plowyng’, ‘cartyng’, ‘hedgyng and dychyng’, exposed all year round to the weather. ‘Some yn wynter fryse, some yn somer fry ...”

“... both sides of the Channel abandoned wigs and powder for hair worn au naturel. The English jacobin John Thelwall, tried for treason in 1794, cut his short in the Roman manner. A radical songster celebrated the look: ‘Each Brutus, each Cato, were none of them fops/But all to a man wore republican crops.’ In 1795 the style took on added significance when ...”

“... book’s epigraph is from Hamlet: ‘Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.’ An image combining confinement and possibility fits well enough with McEwan’s sense, most fully explored in Saturday, that Western life in the 21st century is a luxurious purgatory, with ...”