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“... dismissing it as ‘speculative’. After Nealon’s conviction was quashed, the then chair, Richard Foster, apologised and promised the CCRC would do everything it could to prevent anything similar from happening in the future.In 2010, Bob Woffinden wrote in the Guardian that ‘the CCRC has become characterised by pusillanimity and procrastination. It ...”

“... with the emphases of Jonson’s The Forest, where the country is praised ‘as an image of the King’s peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its ...”

“... Simone’s singing broadcast not just a new sound but a new time. Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole – great black song stylists who emerged out of the 1940s and crossed over into the commercial white mainstream – succeeded precisely because their tone and diction took race out of their voices; they swung but without soul, which made the songs and ...”

“... elaborately presented. In the great tournament ordered by Henry VIII in 1511, for example, the king and three companions, presenting themselves as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and ...”

“... satires is the cartoon showing just two sombre figures, Edmund Burke and the Reverend Dr Richard Price. It was Price’s republican sermon ‘On the Love of Our Country’ that had given Burke the pretext for his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Gillray entitled his double portrait Smelling out a Rat; – or – the Atheistical-Revolutionist ...”

“... its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in ...”

“... Richardson give an account of the poet greeting an attack by Colley Cibber, who was to be crowned King of the Dunces in the final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of Cibber’s pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, ‘These things are my diversion.’ They sat by ...”

“... stood, queens, princes, heathen courtiers, and in some dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”

“... woman, Cosima, wife of his young protégé Hans von Bülow, and he has found a loyal patron, the King of Bavaria. On the last page he hears of the death of his old enemy, the German-born Parisian composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wendelin Weissheimer, a minor German composer and Wagner groupie, provides the epitaph by ‘bursting out into harsh laughter at the ...”

“... History: You can go back as far as you like, to Roderick O’Connor, the last High King of Ireland, who in 1175 surrendered to the King of England. Or, if Northern Ireland is locally in question, to the 17th-century Plantations of Ulster, the immediate occasion of our divisions. Thereafter, as Catholic ...”

“... court, parliament and the law, and it is strange to have such cultural nationalism ascribed to a king whose ostensible war-aim was to be king of France. Mr Johnson’s nationalism has other unfortunate results. As befits a historian who began his account of English national identity with the heresy of a Welsh monk, Mr ...”

“... is cut up like a bullock at Smith field,’ he merely commented that he had now seen a king beheaded and that king avenged. Many other sights were to drive him to anger or disgust, but in this entry he was being studiously hard-boiled, as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 ...”

“... then ‘Audrey pointed to one of Elizabeth’s enormous jewels and asked: “Kenny Lane?” “No, Richard Burton,” replied Taylor, and both stars screamed with laughter.’ It blows my mind – I don’t know a more proper way to say it – to imagine Hepburn pointing to Taylor’s jewels, as if the two were simply women at a party, not symbolic figures ...”