“... their whiskers messing about with it. Then again, he was an alchemist, not a Madagascan pirate king swearing a magical oath of brotherhood. And for that ritual a gunpowder drink was essential.The formula, recorded by the French-Mauritian chronicler Nicolas Mayeur in 1806 and reproduced in the late David Graeber’s Pirate Enlightenment, called for gun ...”

“... it comes to Beyoglu. In 1939, ‘while new government offices were rising in Ankara,’ Charles King writes in Midnight at Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, ‘the Turkish government organised an international design competition to solicit proposals for solving the problem of Istanbul’s future development.’* The winner was Henri Prost, a French ...”

“... contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British ...”

“... That, I suppose, is evident enough from Hill’s manner of procedure in such previous volumes as King Log and Mercian Hymns, but it feels particularly the case with his new poem. In an end-note he claims that ‘Péguy, stubborn ran-cours and mishaps and all, is one of the great souls, one of the great prophetic intelligences, of our century,’ and putting ...”

“... paladin, by the name of Shambo Bolongongo, could and should be thought of, in local terms, as a ‘King Alfred and Harun al Rashid and Charlemagne all in one person’. Yet Torday remained sufficiently sober to know that he still had to have a date: no date no history, and no history no Shambo. Unhappily the elders of the Bushong, while eager to help ...”

“... knew that the woman acting ‘the pious widow’ was ‘also a hoofer, always happy to show a king a bit of leg’. Incongruity and bracing anachronism are Griffiths’s favourite tricks. Shakespeare’s antique-seeming language in Troilus and Cressida is like our manufacture of ‘distressed pine’ or ‘stone-washed jeans’. When Thersites uses ...”

“... Victorian decade began in 1856, when the Tipperary Bank collapsed and the chairman’s brother, John Sadleir, a serial swindler up to his neck in debt, made the headlines with that suicide by poison on Hampstead Heath (thereby achieving immortality as Merdle in Little Dorrit). A sequence of failures followed: the Royal British Bank, the Western Bank of ...”

“... used vociferously to demand, who will analyse the analysts, if not the artist? Philip Roth, like John Updike, is a survivor from the glory days of the heavyweights, the Hemingways and the Faulkners and the Bellows. His first book, the story collection Goodbye, Columbus, published in 1959, won the National Book Award, a notable achievement for a tyro in his ...”

“... of the valley’), records changes in the Rhondda through terrible puns (‘We’ve no news of King Coal’) and an outrageous final conceit: They’re expanding The factory at Merthyr That makes Janet Reger Luxury Lingerie. Anthracite is reclaimed By the dictionary. We read our future In the bottom of a D-cup. Thus my fingers fighting Gordius Behind ...”

“... it presented itself as the preserver of a hallowed constitution. It claimed to be fighting for ‘king and Parliament’, professed undying loyalty to Charles, and blamed the situation not on him but on evil advisers and established institutions. Those justifications were repeated regularly, if with diminishing conviction, throughout the war of 1642-46. Yet ...”

“... bipolar Kulturkampf, it did leak out to a wide public through the fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy game was a thing in itself, and ...”

“... has eluded them, and its subject is one of the four or five people who stick in my gullet. John Traill Christie was my headmaster for just over four years. I never knew him well, though I have had to think about him a lot. For a brief period I must have occupied his thoughts because he spent about a term and a half, which coincided with some of ...”

“... elaborately presented. In the great tournament ordered by Henry VIII in 1511, for example, the king and three companions, presenting themselves as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and ...”

“... schools. It is the apparent similarity between the third and fourth waves that animates Desmond King’s Making Americans. Yet his deeply researched and closely reasoned book has ambitions well beyond its immediate subject. He isn’t much concerned with the motives or circumstances that prompted these people to migrate in the first place; and he is only ...”

“... pattern with Johns. About one fifth of all males in the UK between 1800 and 1850 were christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so ...”