“... too little to engage with it. What a strange character is Tennyson’s Arthur in Idylls of the King, for instance: the only Arthur since the 12th century not to be the incestuous father of Mordred, and at the same time the most rigorously de-Celticised and Anglicised figure since Layamon’s. What a fate for the hammer of the Saxons, the great obverse of ...”

“... the account of it is inaccurate in almost every detail (old men forget), he warned me that Cecil King, because I declined to do something he asked of me, would make sure I’d never find another job in London. In fact, as I rightly supposed, Mr King, if ever he had any such intention, which is very doubtful, simply had not ...”

“... speak of, which is more than can be said of the most distinguished of all Crusaders, the sainted King Louis IX of France. Newby is also clear and intelligible on the political context of Saladin’s life, which is no mean achievement, even if, to judge from Lyons and Jackson, he cuts a few corners. He is fair and balanced in his treatment of the ...”

“... governments have tried to subdue the Corporation. Mrs Thatcher’s man was said to have been Lord King, privatiser of British Airways, and a highly unsuitable choice that would have been. We have been spared Lord King, who has withdrawn, and rumour has had it that we may be given Lord Barnett instead, someone with no ...”

“... King Alexander ​ of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille on 9 October 1934, alongside Louis Barthou, the French foreign minister. When the news reached Dubrovnik, the bells rang ‘all morning long’ according to a ten-year-old American girl staying in the city. ‘Everybody spoke in an undertone except the roosters and my brother ...”

“... would give her a son named Mohamed or a girl called Fatma, and the son becomes the brother of the King of England, Head of the Church, there had to be a solution,’ Mansour continued. ‘The solution was to dispose of the princess and her groom. In that way, the royal family’s nightmare would be at an end.’ It’s true there had been mentions of Arab ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”

“... at home in Rome, was as much concerned with compositional elegance as believability: in his Saint Michael and the Devil (1607), the saint props his knee on candyfloss clouds so delicate it’s hard to imagine them taking his weight. Artemisia’s Allegory of Inclination (1615-16), by contrast, part of a decorative ceiling in Florence commissioned by ...”

“... happened to have been unusually pro-British, having had his son christened George in honour of King George V, and also insisting that ‘George Blake’ should retain his British nationality. The plot now thickens – and especially after the Allied victory has been won in the ruins of Berlin. For by then ‘Stalin’s Englishmen’, that remnant of the ...”

“... mind. The volume also includes Auden’s hitherto unpublished translation of the Icelandic ‘Sun King’, the work of a Christian skald in traditional Eddaic form, a vision of the seven heavens and of Lucifer the dragon who waylays the Christian soul. Auden’s flatness here (‘The unpredictable often may/Have sad and cruel results ... ’) is redeemed ...”

“... It has long been accepted that neither the Union of Crowns of 1603, which saw the Scottish King James VI move south to London, nor the Treaty of Union of 1707 served to cancel out Scottish distinctiveness. In educational, ecclesiastical, intellectual and legal terms, and not only those, Scotland has always retained significant ...”

“... to investigate without political interference. It would have sixty staff, the then home secretary, Michael Howard, announced in 1995, ‘about three times the number currently engaged in such work’, who would ‘reflect the broad mix of legal, investigative and administrative skills and experience needed’. It would have twelve commissioners, three of whom ...”

“... model’, for apparently ‘Biblical government is minimal [and] decentralised’, though neither King Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents nor the various genocides of the Old Testament seem all that minimalist. The Institute of Directors is perhaps not meant to be taken very seriously, but the Conservative Party does have that ambition. Yet the official ...”

“... it in 2018 for more than a million dollars. The blurbs from people like Gillian Flynn and Stephen King (‘stunning’, ‘gripping’, ‘brilliant’) led me to believe I was sitting down to a thriller, but there are no unexpected plot twists here. In a disclaimer, Russell says any similarities with her own upbringing – she grew up in Maine and withdrew ...”

“... version, but he would have known the mythic one quite well: for in the story of Perseus, the king and his court, who had sent the hero for the head of Gorgon Medusa, had to look when he took the disfigured thing from his bag, and were turned into stone. What goes for seeing also goes for imagining we are seeing. We do a lot of such imagining, and many of ...”