“... and Biblical criticism propelled them towards atheism and got them into trouble with the pious new king of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who came to the throne in 1840 and turned the government’s educational policy in a more conservative direction. Denied university careers, the Young Hegelian thinkers moved rapidly to the left. Sperber plays down the ...”

“... had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fled to England. These last words, the flight of the King, linger on my ear at this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to a perception of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantine sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke itself preserved for subsequent wondering reference. I had ...”

“... tone pretty well with his remark that ‘the Jewish Marienbad has gone downhill since the British King Edward died.’ But Mr Soroker’s social standing is toppled by an epistle in the most ceremonious and denunciatory Hebrew from the formidably orthodox Itche-Meyers, accusing him of paying Falstaffian attentions to both their wives: their letter (here ...”

“... with Japanese to a degree he makes plain even to me who know not a syllable of the language, Richard Bowring has forfeited some command of English. That looks all the likelier when he skids into bad grammar: ‘ ... sent to whomever was to copy out the story’. Or perhaps both the ‘indiscrete’ and the ‘whomever’ are misprints. If so, there is ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... and flippers we eddied at the deep end watching I Love Lucy.Dad, who was generally considered the king of Broadway comedy, had only the year before replaced Sid Caesar, the new king of TV comedy, in the national tour of the revue Make Mine Manhattan. Back then, the radio comedian Fred Allen joked, television was called ‘a ...”

“... writing: all you had to do was state your fantastical intentions – Leeks (Blue Solaise), Leeks (King Richard), Nasturtium (Moonlight), Nasturtium (Whirlybird), Nasturtium (Canary Creeper) – and nature would take care of the rest. Guy’s income came mostly from the restaurant trade and the Union Square farmers’ market in New York. His specialities ...”

“... Reddings moved back to Tindall Heights. The year Redding turned 14 was also the year that Little Richard – a Macon native who had made a small name for himself as a gospel singer before switching over to rhythm and blues – recorded ‘Tutti Frutti’. Redding fell in love with the song, and with Little Richard’s ...”

“... be seen.’Some special forces memoirs have been so popular they have led to pulp franchises. Richard Marcinko, the first commander of SEAL Team Six, later convicted of defrauding the US government, published his bestselling memoir, Rogue Warrior, in 1992 and followed it with more than a dozen thrillers fictionalising various SEAL missions. Eric ...”

“... career as the avatar of the good and the not-so-good, still travelling in the wake of Little Richard. The history of rock ’n’ roll focuses on the white triumvirate – Presley, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, who have at different times heaped contumely on themselves – neglecting its roots in Jazz and the Blues, and a sibling relationship with ...”

“... piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George III King of England. The Founding Fathers, wise in their generation, could not foresee Hot Lines, B52s and the social security system, but they knew that they had created an office that might be dangerous to liberty. Hence they hedged it round as best they could with ...”

“... for his group portrait in the sacristy of El Escorial, La Sagrada Forma, which shows the King kneeling before the miraculous host of Gorkum, which had shed blood when profaned by the Protestants in 1572. Soria dismissed Coello as someone who had done no more than ‘pave the way for the superficial, playful Rococo’, but Brown calls La Sagrada Forma ...”

“... but Be’) The poem switches between dredged-up confessions (‘I did it, I myself, killing the King my father’) and jokes faster than any audience could keep up with. The brackets around ‘(seriously though)’ epitomise the poem’s tone: that moment when the comedian draws the breathless audience together and they don’t know whether they’ve been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... comes to find it difficult to write about Charles without moderation. Instead of thinking, like Dr Richard Cust, that revision has tended to throw out the baby with the bathwater, he thinks that there are large quantities of Whig bathwater still to be drained. Many of Dr Sharpe’s arguments will be engaged by historians for some time to come. He does not ...”