“... Sonnets. The court advised Bampfylde ‘in the mean time to be upon his good behaviour’ to the King, ‘and all his Subjects, especially towards the said Sr Joshua Reynolds’. One is left wondering how successfully Bampfylde maintained ‘good behaviour’ in the weeks that followed. There is no reference in the Public Advertiser’s report to the ...”

“... out of line. Enter Muhammad Ali, who over the next few years was to change the face of boxing. David Remnick’s book in fact concentrates on the two astonishing fights Ali had with Liston (Ali won the title in the first and defended it successfully in the second), and on the relationship between Ali, Liston and Patterson. For Remnick, as for most ...”

“... is obsessively riding the New York subway when we first hear it. ‘There’s more to it,’ David Ferrie says in the same novel. ‘There’s always more to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.’ Surface and secret: even when people dispute the details, the names and the numbers, they ...”

“... last, Fait et à faire, last February. This was soon followed by The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis, Castoriadis’s major expositor in the English-speaking world: a festschrift edited by Curtis appeared last May as an issue of the journal, Thesis Eleven, which has been a major platform for Castoriadis’s ideas. In later life, Castoriadis ...”

“... contemporary power with glamour and authority. Among the incisively captioned illustrations is David Wilkie’s painting of George IV in Highland dress – the outfit he wore for his entry into Edinburgh in 1822 (an event that was stage-managed by Scott) – opposite the playbill for a production in 1823 of Shakespeare’s ...”

“... for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black have been in Britain for more than two thousand years. During the third century, North African Roman soldiers formed part of the occupation of the British Isles: ‘Aurelian Moors’ were ...”

“... This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man who shot him’; Baudelaire’s ‘king of the blue’ brought ‘stumbling and ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are ...”

“... were lost in the world, they might all again be painted to the life out of the story of this king.’ To the 17th-century republicans Edmund Ludlow and Algernon Sidney, Henry would be ‘that monster of mankind’, ‘one of the most violent princes we ever had’. To Bolingbroke in the 18th century, Henry’s would appear the most ‘severe’ of ...”

“... reminder that the RSC’s standards have always been based on a close study of the words. David Suchet convincingly shows that his human rather than fishy, black but not monstrous Caliban was a perfectly logical reading, in defiance of grand and inhuman Calibans stretching back to Beerbohm Tree, who, taking his name too literally perhaps, regressed ...”

“... most powerful man in the country. Judgments on him tended to be harsh. One British agent, Colonel David Smiley, wrote that Shehu ‘boasted’ of having personally slit the throats of 70 Italian prisoners during the war. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Tito had told him that Shehu had strangled his predecessor as Minister of the Interior, Koci ...”

“... when two tiny tufts of pale feathers sprout from either side of its head, making it look like David Ben-Gurion. Though these tufts last only a few weeks, and aren’t often noticed, they give the bird its name. How was it possible for me to see so little of a bird I thought I knew? And to know so little of a bird I thought I saw? Perhaps it was the ...”

“... years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over who exactly could claim to have ...”

“... and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the ...”

“... It caused the British, sickened by such Jewish terrorism as Menachem Begin directed against the King David Hotel and alarmed by the danger of a revival of anti-semitism, to throw in their hand. The result was chaos. Professor Louis describes America displaying herself at her worst and in response Britain doing likewise; both showed scant regard for the ...”

“... a triple-decker steak sandwich washed down with bourbon’. Lunch, ‘inhaled’ (this is David Thomson’s word) while rehearsing The Shoemaker’s Holiday, soon to be Welles’s second hit for the Mercury Players, was comparably stupefying. Callow depicts Welles perched at a table in the stalls, ‘roaring out instructions and mock abuse as he ...”