“... him by his father:Lady Pembroke’s husband, Henry, was charming but he was also a shit and the King was so incensed by the Earl’s behaviour towards his wife that he demanded to know what possible excuse he had for treating her so badly. To which the Earl replied: ‘Sire, if you had a wife whose cunt was as cold as a greyhound’s nostril, you would have ...”

“... a visit to the region at the urging of the writer Gregorio Marañón; shocked by the poverty, the king ordered the first road to be built. ‘Work went slowly,’ Baxter writes. ‘Spain seemed almost to prefer Las Hurdes in its primitive state. Marañón, a bullfight aficionado and cultural traditionalist, regarded it as Spain in its purest form, and even ...”

“... in the essays on film in this book, where Cavell may link, for example, Buster Keaton to Martin Heidegger’s understanding of the ‘world-hood of the world announcing itself’; it appears, too, in the recurrent theme of Emerson and Thoreau as underwriting ordinary language philosophy, a theme Cavell acknowledges most of his colleagues will find ...”

“... which is not the scene of de la Mare’s engrossing stanza: Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’? The old king to the sparrow. Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’? Rust to the harrow. It is solid stuff: the more we repeat it the more true facts emerge. The old king’s words are at once a threat, a gibe and an ironical comment ...”

“... that liberty which you have defended’, arguing that Cromwell ought not to assume the title of king, because actions such as his are lost in clouds like ‘the points of pyramids’. Later, Satan in Paradise Lost is shown raised on a mount ‘with pyramids and towers’. It may be that the connection with Milton is a coincidence, but I cannot think that ...”

“... Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as historical: the play originally printed as The History of King Lear had to be reclassified as a tragedy (just as the erstwhile tragedies of Richard II and Richard III became histories), and was joined by Cymbeline, despite that play’s competing affinities with history and with comedy. Other potential anomalies ...”

“... the exam. Other kids who liked books were obsessed with the Holocaust, or serial killers, Stephen King, gangsters or Flowers in the Attic. My poison was Mailer. His writing popped off the page and in Advertisements for Myself I saw everything I felt a writer could be, a cosmonaut of psychic space who could find the pulse of their time in themselves. Literary ...”

“... to whom all sorts of rumour could be attributed, a twisted figment of the public’s imagination. Martin Doherty makes it clear in Nazi Wireless Propaganda (2000) that outbreaks of Haw-Haw scare stories recurred throughout the war, at moments of maximum stress: after the defeats of 1942, during the air-raids of that year, and with the first use of flying ...”

“... darkest, he concluded, between 1550 and 1849. According to one estimate, when Henry VIII became king in 1509 there were 139 vineyards in England and Wales, all on the verge of steep decline. The impact of lower temperatures was felt across the northern hemisphere. Farmers in the Chinese province of Jiangxi, for instance, found they could no longer grow ...”

“... when this year Pontius Pilate is not the only one washing his hands.16 April. A card from Tom King with news of the tattoo of me that he had put on his arm (pictured in the Diary published in the LRB of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation ...”

“... for the Society was not born with any sense of mission against the Reformation. Like Martin Luther, Loyola wished to transform and inspire the Latin Western Church, but their conversion experiences took them on opposite trajectories, respectively rebellion and obedience (of a sort). We should also dispense with the common idea that Loyola was a ...”

“... funding to Ark’s schools. In 2012, when his proposal to send a leatherbound copy of the King James Bible to every state school in the UK was nixed by David Cameron on grounds of cost, Marshall was among those who stepped in to foot the £370,000 bill. The following year, Gove appointed him lead non-executive director in the Department of ...”

“... in a situation’) was to embark on a lecture tour. Suggested topics included ‘How to Meet the King’ and ‘Sex Life at Oxford University’. In fairness, he was qualified to talk about both. In the US, as Unity’s sister and Churchill’s nephew they were instant stars, the ‘Blueblood Adventurers’. They did some journalism but no ...”

“... crowd was entertained by a choir of Black children dressed as slaves, among them the ten-year-old Martin Luther King.O’Connor’s story ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1953, lampoons the première and the sentimental vision of Southern identity it represented. This is how it ...”

“... right convictions but sometimes also entertain the Above all, while the best are the guests, like King Duncan, of the Beast. Two English writers went to Cuba. One went after Fidel Castro became lord and master of the island or rather archipelago. The other went before and after that unholy second coming. Edna O’Brien, poor girl, visited Cuba the way Alice ...”