“... promise of an early and highly coded, not to say obscure and ‘poetic’ novel, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, for the sordid aftermath, my tiresome and overt obsession with homosexuality. Most French critics, I’m happy to say, and in the end the publisher as well, were satisfied that I’d not turned Genet into a gay folk hero, as they’d feared – an ...”

“... their British dimension, but has ranged far beyond them. One hero of The Ancient Constitution was James Harrington, whose Oceana (1656) offered his countrymen a new, republican language of politics. Subsequently Harrington has become a hero of a much larger story. Republicanism is the theme of the second of Pocock’s two main books, The Machiavellian Moment ...”

“... The potato, which was to end it for all but fussy eaters, still awaited general adoption. But James Lind, in his definitive work on the causation of the disease, a work to which the author refers, points out the error of what she is here doing, a common medical sin of his day – that of attributing to it almost every type of lesion. Highlanders had a ...”

“... I look up at a gable-end: Lest We Forget This plaque is dedicated to the memory of Lt Col Trevor King died July 1994 Major W. (Frenchie) Marchant These men were killed near this spot by the enemies of Ulster. No Sacrifice is too great for one’s country. This looks like an unyielding Loyalist memorial, but the sense now is of working-class Protestants ...”

“... fringe event of the day, on ‘securing the borders’. I tagged along. On a makeshift stage, James Frayne, a Conservative strategist, was explaining to a full house that Reform’s stance on immigration aligns with public attitudes. In recent YouGov polling, 38 per cent of respondents rated Reform ‘best at handling asylum and ...”

“... intensity. In November 1688, when William of Orange landed in England to oust Anne’s father, King James II, the Marlboroughs seized their chance. Sarah helped the Princess to escape from Whitehall and brought her safely to William’s camp, while her husband deserted from the King’s Army and took as many ...”

“... friends and, as much as possible for someone living in a small town, I tried to renounce what the King James Version calls the friendship of the world (James 4.4). I tried to be polite to my parents. I studied the Bible and read devotional books, inspirational books, books by a woman who’d saved Jews from the ...”

“... Howard French to Jason Stearns, to say nothing of Adam Hochschild’s study of the Free State, King Leopold’s Ghost, and Neal Ascherson’s The King Incorporated. David Van Reybrouck’s enormous history is the latest addition to this literature. Van Reybrouck is a Dutch-speaking Belgian journalist whose father was ...”

“... back to Venezuela in the late 1590s, but never again set foot there himself. In 1618 he persuaded King James to let him out of the Tower, where he’d spent 13 years concocting his Guinea Balsam and writing the History of the World under a suspended death sentence. He was allowed a final attempt to find El Dorado, on the outcome of which hung pardon or ...”

“... polemic. Just as missionaries prefer modern or idiomatic translations of the Bible over the King James version when trying to convert the heathen, Jones may have hoped that evolutionists would find his update a more effective evangelical tool than Darwin. His book, however, will be read only by the converted; it is not going to sell well in the ...”

“... snobbish about its Dutch origins and its tulip festival, and named after our least successful king, James II, when he was Duke of York and Albany. One year, when I told friends in Manhattan that I was going to Albany to hear the hippy, marijuana-influenced poems of a Londoner who was living with another poet, half-Negro ...”

“... of a less prestigious medical team hastily assembled by the Capucin exorcists, neither the King’s physicians nor he himself seem to have felt the slightest doubt that Marthe was a fraud being used for political ends. Professor Walker’s discussion of the surrounding circumstances only strengthens this withering diagnosis. He is particularly ...”

“... more than his father’s because of its connections with royalty (she was remotely descended from King James I of Scotland); at school, he boasted so much about the (alleged) venerability of his title that he was facetiously nicknamed ‘the Old English Baron’. Occasionally the pretension turned more prickly: invited to join a formal procession, he ...”

“... modern, the talk of the natives weirdly Biblical and that of strong men quaintly Victorian: ‘King and country, death and glory, all the rest of it, knew that. Knew that I might cop it one day, or get a bullet in the backside, lose a leg, couple of fingers, that sort of thing ... Ordinary wounds. You know. Didn’t expect the others. The ones you speak ...”

“... and Error, whose investigations had helped overturn numerous cases, and the forensic psychiatrist James MacKeith, who provided expert evidence for the defence for the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Miscarriages would no doubt still occur, but now at least there was a proper mechanism to identify and reverse them.In July 2023 another man made a speech ...”