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“... added in order to make them exist?’ This seems to be the old philosophical problem of the bald king of France, and surely represents one of the lures of language rather than a fact about it. For some reason we long to believe that the possession of a name confers existence on a thing, when everything we know about language and lying ought to prompt ...”

“... life of crime, since he can perish and still live – like a monarchy rather than an individual king or queen. In Lang’s film we see him dead, but the doctor who is his passionate admirer takes over. He not only continues Mabuse’s criminal enterprises but finally, after a few more murders, some spectacular fireworks at a chemical factory and an ...”

“... bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... are familiar. But in this regard Italy, as Steinberg underlines, was a special case. Loyal to the King rather than to the Duce, mindful of the fact that their country’s unification had come about in opposition to the power of the Church, the nation’s top brass cultivated a form of in-group snobbery virtually unique in the Western world. Here alone, as far ...”

“... and drinking he lavishes on his cronies. De Chatellerault is a boaster who was sent by the King to win the hand, for political ends, of a fabled beauty in the Languedoc, and has just returned without her. At first Bardelys treats him as an honoured guest; when the others start taunting the visitor for his failure, he joins in like a schoolboy following ...”

“... the country closer to a Greek-style collapse. During the negotiations, we are told that Mervyn King stood ready in the wings waiting to brief the Lib Dems on the nation’s finances. Laws says that this offer was refused, on the grounds that they ‘didn’t want to feel bounced on economic policy by what anyone else might say’. But the strong impression ...”

“... literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire cloisters for his new castle in California. As one Spanish ...”

“... the saints who visited her, when, for instance, she was pressed at her trial to specify whether St Michael wore wings or not. What Miss Warner emphasises, however, is that her experience was not of mystical rapture, but had a mundane, realistic bearing: she was being instructed to leave Domrémy and undertake a mission for her bleeding country, and this ...”

“... of the ‘rules of war’, and that James II lacked legitimacy because he was no longer legal King of England. He was surely a king to the Irish who fought at the Boyne, and for that reason a threat, not only to the religious unity of the Williamite settlement, but to its whole territorial integrity. The early 18th ...”

“... for the patria’ – the words inscribed on monuments to the Nationalist war dead, as recorded in Michael Richards’s excellent monograph After the Civil War.* The defeated Republican half of Spain was commonly referred to in the press as ‘the Red horde’. Hundreds of thousands of them were killed by Nationalist paramilitaries in a largely planned attempt ...”

“... in the grass behind his dugout. He arrived in France as a willing, if not eager, officer of the king. By autumn, however, he understood that the death that had overtaken a steady stream of his comrades was highly likely to come to him too. In one pathetic note to my grandfather, at that time a popular playwright, he asked him to try to use his influence to ...”

“... attempts are being made to argue that you can make ‘safe’ cuts by spending more effectively. Michael Gove, the education spokesman, is particularly strong on this. But one thing the Thatcher governments did demonstrate is that there are no ‘safe’ cuts to be found in the public services – or, if there are, no one has yet found where to make ...”

“... performing a battle scene. The most famous of them was Peter Lobengula, said to be the son of King Lobengula of Matabeleland (now Zimbabwe), who attracted considerable attention by marrying a white woman called Kitty Jewell. Troupes of minstrels toured Britain, creating a genre so popular that it remained a staple of television light entertainment until ...”

“... for a cabinet post, Rosina wrote to the prime minister, Lord Derby, denouncing the pair as ‘one King of Sodom and the other King of Gomorrah’. Terrified of what might emerge in a divorce hearing, Bulwer-Lytton consulted six doctors, all of whom agreed that Rosina was insane. He did nothing until June, when he was ...”

“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”