“... James I’s leading minister the Duke of Buckingham donned false beards, assumed the names Tom and John Smith, and journeyed to the Spanish court to woo the infanta for Charles? Incognito travel, a commonplace practice of the age, produced a succession of improbable adventures, among them (as if in compensation for the Puritan closure of the theatres) the ...”

“... The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most ...”

“... were banned. On one side of the new coin was the lily, emblem of Florence, and on the other St John the Baptist, the city’s patron saint. Thus civic duty and religious observance were elegantly fused, in gold. When Jesus was asked by the Pharisees, ‘Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar?’ he had been able to take a coin in his hand, point to ...”

“... Cry (a Moorcock favourite), through his love for his cousin Rosie and his spiky relationship with John Barbican Begg, developer and despoiler, global media tycoon. Revelations, betrayals, shifts of fortune, seductions, conspiracies, keep the fingers flicking over the pages. Dead on cue, after some cunningly weighted rhetorical passage, a jibe at ‘Pretty ...”

“... of a certain kind of common sense, the kind that most 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 ...”

“... well before Wright. Homosexual smears were directed against Edward Heath, Jeremy Thorpe, Norman St John Stevas and Humphrey Berkeley; bogus bank accounts (showing corrupt earnings) were contrived for Edward Short and Ian Paisley; Wilson was seen as the beneficiary of, and a possible participant in, the assassination of Hugh Gaitskell; lists were drawn up of ...”

“... of a fine new biography, Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel. Perhaps immodestly, its author, John Woodhouse, who teaches Italian at Oxford, says in his Preface: ‘This is the first fully documented biography of Gabriele D’Annunzio in any language, and, within the limits of reason, given the bizarre nature of D’Annunzio’s career, the first ...”

“... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...”

“... argued the apologist George Fitzhugh, would be better off if we enslaved them all, for then their masters would have some incentive to clothe them, feed them and see them through hard times. Abraham Lincoln came up with a famous rejoinder when he insisted that working for wages was only a temporary condition. Among us, he said, nobody with talent languishes ...”

“... exercise book with star ratings and plot synopses for Meg Ryan romantic comedies, Disney cartoons, John Grisham adaptations, disaster movies and action thrillers, along with harder-breathing fare from the Dogme 95 group and Leos Carax’s Pola X, remorselessly grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as ...”

“... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...”

“... as if it were an abracadabra. Only give us the wand, the hungry hotshots cry, and we’ll be masters of the universe. At one point the super-suits are even prepared to sit manipulating the ends of a metre of rope to learn from a French funambulist how to make a clove hitch knot that unties, if you do it right, as if by magic. They’ve paid their ...”

“... to join Proust and Kafka, Michel Tournier and Thomas Bernhard on Bail’s shelf of severe masters – is the big daddy rabbit-killer; Bail and his minimalist contemporaries are something of a mopping-up operation. The anxiety here is that of being the last guest at the wake of Modernism, and so Bail is compelled to return, parodically, obsessively, to ...”

“... of ‘Good old Toyners’: later he was fined a pound by the Party. The Cambridge of John Cornford would have regarded such frivolity as monstrous.) He was consistently irresponsible and enjoyed, rather than feared, the thunderbolts that followed. In Brussels in 1945 he used to dress up as a padre in battle-dress and dog-collar: but Miss Mitford ...”

“... a poem about the best room in the house, reserved for deaths and Christmas, by alluding to two masters: ‘My mind moves upon silence and Aeneid VI.’ In Yeats’s ‘Long-Legged Fly’ mastery is possible – Caesar, Helen of Troy, Michelangelo – because the mind can accept its conditions by sequestering itself within them: Like a long-legged fly upon ...”