“... classes had taken fright, just as they were meant to. Byron prophesied to Hobhouse that ‘the king times are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end.’ On the other hand, from Byron’s own personal point of view, ‘born an aristocrat, and naturally one by temper, with the ...”

“... the ‘French luxury titan’), the ‘serial dater of supermodels’, and the ‘leveraged-buyout king’. The book is illustrated with photographs of de Pury’s friends, such as Tita Thyssen-Bornemisza (wearing a ‘100+ carat diamond’), Al Taubman and Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. De Pury was private curator to Baron ‘Heini’ – Hans Heinrich ...”

“... is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from ...”

“... prosperity across the world’, which is bankrolled by New Zealand hedge fund billionaire Christopher Chandler. At Arc’s second ‘global conference’ in London last month, the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, warned that unless the Tories renewed their policies and ideas, ‘our country and all of Western civilisation will be lost.’ The Arc ...”

“... beStill the indomitable Irishry.Yeats died on 28 January 1939. Two days earlier, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had arrived in New York. When Auden heard of Yeats’s death, he sought to ascertain what time of the day or night he had died. He was planning a poem. What preoccupied him most in 1939 was guilt that his gift for poetry was serving ...”

“... from the circumstances, public or private, that created them. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King drew inspiration from his sense of what the reading public of the time needed to hear. Now their art remains, but not that life which once gave it real meaning. In Russia, circumstances have not changed, and the uncompromisingly personal utterance of these ...”

“... Come-On’ and ‘Remembering Lunch’. ‘The Come-On’ takes its epigraph from Camus: ‘The king’s son who kept watch over the gates of the garden in which I wanted to live’. It does not take the class war quite seriously, and that makes it the more effectively disconcerting. Can I become the king’s son? But ...”

“... the filling more than makes up for it. The chapters on ‘honest’ in Othello and ‘fool’ in King Lear are exemplary studies of how words can express and generate social turmoil, and remain among the best essays ever written on Shakespeare. The reason they’re so good is that they show how each word could be used not just with a range of senses, but ...”

“... This is in many ways the full-dress portrait of the young man so brilliantly sketched by Christopher Hampton in Total Eclipse. The exotic otherness of Rimbaud to his Anglo-Saxon readers is indissociable from myths about French Revolutionary violence, the Paris Commune, Continental sexual mores, French art, French bohemianism, Parisian chic and ...”

“... serious but highly readable, were reappearing as Ash wrote: Rosalind Mitchison, T.C. Smout and Christopher Harvie were among the most successful authors. They wrote mostly narrative or social history, revealing unknown territory to generations who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom ...”

“... produced the trash, a lurid account written by the former British MI6 intelligence agent Christopher Steele, based on hearsay purchased from anonymous Russian sources. Amid prostitutes and golden showers, a story emerged: the Russian government had been blackmailing and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president ...”

“... I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon I rested on a hilltop, on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was ...”

“... by specific occasion or active collaboration to have known Shakespeare personally, which relegates Christopher Marlowe to a glowering presence on the sidelines, and also excludes that engaging gadfly Thomas Nashe, though both had a decisive stylistic influence on Shakespeare in the 1590s, and both must surely have known him. I would also have liked more about ...”

“... animation. But Olamina dies before the starships actually take off. The first is called the Christopher Columbus, in spite of her objections. ‘This ship is not about a shortcut to riches and empire. It’s not about snatching up slaves and gold and presenting them to some European monarch. But one can’t win every battle. One must know which battles ...”

“... of us have to live by. Not Canetti’s great masters, however. Shakespeare may not have wept over King Lear, may indeed have written the play in a passion of relish, but he suffered: the play is a correlative of his total capacity to suffer. That is perhaps self-evident and tautologous. In a climate of pseudo-scientific structuralism, a bloodlessly ...”