“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of ...”

“... reflect that we have worse things to fear than banshees. But at the end of the last century M.R. James’s head lay easy, pillowed on Eton and King’s. In the introduction to this reissue, ‘Monty’s’ stories are made, by one of the Oxford Book editors, to look like a game which registers a displacement of the ...”

“... were quite often written down. In the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, the Scottish nobles warn King Robert that if he should let them down and ‘yield Scotland or us to the English king or people’, they will dethrone him and choose another. ‘We who are as good as you swear to you who are no better than us to accept ...”

“... came closer than any previous demoniac to political power and the forces vying for it: the king, the diplomats of the Church, the aristocracy, the demagogues and the crowd. Fear of contagious mass enthusiasm meant that her time in Paris was spent in increasingly restricted spaces – private chapels and prison cells – where prelates and doctors ...”

“... have supported one leg of the chest. No​ ruler exploited the prestige of Olympia more fully than King Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. He came to the throne in 359 BC and three years later his racehorse won at the games. He minted coins with the image of a horse and rider, making a point to Greeks everywhere about his Hellenic ...”

“... bit as determined and skilful as his father, and Athens once again had to truckle to a foreign king. When reports arrived in 335 that Alexander too was dead, Demosthenes saw yet another chance of liberation and helped foment an anti-Macedonian uprising at Thebes. But Alexander, still very much alive, reconquered Thebes and razed it to the ground. Athens ...”

“... for displays of cultural superiority. Campaigning against decadent Asiatics in Turkey, the Spartan king got his prisoners of war to remove their luxurious clothes, revealing underneath the pale, abundant flesh that luxury had produced. He then put them on exhibition to show his soldiers both how much wealth was available and how little their effeminate victims ...”

“... who normally lived in Moscow, on a stately progress across his realm. He travelled like a medieval king: at each stop, a delegation would come out to meet him, and we would be feasted at obligatory banquets where, alongside the usual sliced sausage and soup, frozen raw fish pieces would be served, curled like wood shavings in the bowl. Bottles of vodka stood ...”

“... In Martin Scorsese​’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence, facsimiles of James Tissot’s paintings hang on the walls of the Beauforts’ Gilded Age mansion, the setting for the annual Opera Ball, where New York plutocrats dance with women in Tissot-inspired dresses. An oversized replica of Too Early (1873) shows the sniggering that meets a group of early arrivals at a ball ...”

“... I called, ‘couple with me, as thou didst with Cadmus, Rhoecus, Tithonus, Endymion, and that king Numa Pompilius to whom thou didst give secrets. As Lilith comes without a sign, so come thou. As the sons of God come to copulate with women, so now let a daughter of Shekhina the Emanation reveal herself to me. Nymph, come now, come now.’ Like a lot of ...”

“... of a ship and its crew on the North Sea, while bringing a Norwegian princess to marry the Scottish king. In the version transcribed by Walter Scott, one of the stanzas runs:Be it wind, be it weet, be it hail, be it sleet,Our ship must sail the faem;The king’s daughter of Noroway,’Tis we maun fetch her hame.Williamson ...”

“... any way memorable, even a chapter that’s memorable. I’ve always liked ‘Henderson the Rain King’ for one. Oh no. Dull, dull ... I think he’s a dull man and a dull writer. Hello, Saul, how are you? Do you feel that way about Philip Roth? Oh, only more so. Philip Roth’s quite funny in a living-room but ... forget it. Bernard ...”

“... New Left Review Benedict Anderson made sharp criticisms of the work of the journalist and poet James Fenton in which a comparison with that of Kapuściński was noted: you were left with the sense of two talented crisis-fancying literary tourists. Kapuściński exercises a personal charm which must have helped him to establish friendly relations with the ...”

“... the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp. He has said a good deal already – the little boy who wants to be like his father, the sheltered child who doesn’t need to know the ...”