“... it could be seen as dishonourable for the king to receive ‘pay’. Indeed, because he seemed too keen to fix tributary obligations, Herodotus says the Persians labelled Darius the ‘commodity trader’: kapelos. Perhaps because of this anxiety, even in the Empire’s last years revenue was partly imagined not as a fee paid in minas and shekels and ...”

“... have appealed much to Leavis either, but they do offer graphic additional proof in support of Peter Ackroyd’s assertion in his 1984 biography of Eliot that ‘when he allowed his sexuality free access, when he was not struggling with his own demons, it was of a heterosexual kind’: When my tall girl sits astraddle on my lap, She with nothing on and I ...”

“... instincts: ‘You’re a grand girl, Prudence, and I’d like to eat you.’ She seems pretty keen on the idea.Black  Mischief draws on Waugh’s time as a foreign correspondent sent to cover the coronation of Haile Selassie, after which he went on to visit Kenya, Uganda and other places – experiences he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good ...”

“... dwellings: the fire was evidence that regulations were being ignored by a construction industry keen to maximise profit. In August 2016, there was another fire at a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush. The London Fire Brigade wrote to every borough council in May 2017 and told them they needed to re-risk-assess their buildings in the light of the fire, but few ...”

“... mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on the site of a Roman fort, has for company the austere concrete box of a decommissioned power station. The ancient oak trees at Mundon Hall were already beginning to die when Warner first saw them; the trunks still stand in spindly ...”

“... courage so that one begins to feel the portrait of Cromwell is as skewed as Robert Bolt’s (or Peter Ackroyd’s) is of More and for the same reason, both men human and therefore venial when embosomed in their respective families. Set against this massive work one’s objections seem petty, and it’s a tribute to the power of the novel that one discusses ...”

“... voters; b. heavily represented in certain constituencies, such as the famous Basildon; and c. keen readers of the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election the Sun ran a headline saying: ‘IF KINNOCK WINS TODAY, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE BRITAIN TURN OUT THE LIGHTS.’ After the result it ran another headline saying: ‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON ...”

“... forgot to acknowledge the ancestral tribe of authors, editors and cartoonists who came before – Peter Arno, Charles Addams, John O’Hara, John Cheever, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, J.D. Salinger, E.B. White, Katharine White (the Mrs White of his telegram) and the sainted William Maxwell – nor did he pull up the ladder against younger novices coming ...”

“... I had some kind of heart problem and therefore wasn’t allowed to do games, which I was very keen on.All games?Well, soccer particularly.Cricket?Not so much. I liked cricket but I was never any good at it. I wasn’t allowed to play games because of this so-called heart problem. It was something I got after I’d had scarlet fever, a sort of follow-up to ...”

“... to the apex of the huge new temple of Zeus at Olympia itself, the closest thing to a pagan St Peter’s: a gilded Victory stood on a shield, with an inscription, since rediscovered, commemorating the battle. The Athenians must have bristled at the fact that a monument of their military humiliation was on display for eternity in just about the most ...”

“... when I asked what a man of his eminence was doing in a crowded, chaotic hospital. He was a keen Chelsea supporter and in between carrying out the tests on Josephine he and I chatted about the great days of Charlie Cooke, David Webb and Peter Osgood. He told me it was already too late to try AZT and 3TC on Josephine ...”

“... Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late teens, and their other children, Micaiah (Cajah), Leonora Elizabeth (Betsey), Emma and baby John. Here, in the summer of 1820, William Hazlitt entered their lives, and here Sarah steps into the limelight of the Liber ...”

“... that little had changed. (The book was published in Spanish in 1981; the English translation by Peter Bush comes out this summer.) As a landlord and his guests languorously discuss peasants and their lack of culture, he boasts that there are no illiterates among his tenants, and to prove it he invites some of them to the dining room to display their ...”

“... Yorkers, Mamdani’s anti-Zionism isn’t a problem.In fact, it may even be an asset, since, as Peter Beinart wrote recently, support for Israel has become ‘a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites’. According to Gallup, only one in three Democrats has a favourable view of Israel. While the party’s leaders – notably Senator Chuck ...”

“... and they may have helped him onto a new footing. Back in London he went into the streets and was keen for the first time to capture passers-by and their shadows. He was ‘oppressed and depressed’ that summer, and his essay for Longman’s grew out of all of these energies.It was prompted by a pamphlet, originally a lecture, by Walter Besant, which made ...”