“... Kermadec reef cries to the sun, Me! Me! This day dawns first on me, you won’t find that in your King James nor Maori story of a half-god’s trap for the sun, that sun ...           which one? Which thousand years? 5. Next time you look, he will have stepped out of the shade the West Front casts into a sun-stuffed ambulatory called Cathedral ...”

“... called themselves John and Thomas Smith. Their mission was to win the hand of the sister of the king of Spain, the Infanta María. The courtly duo were not well suited to a life in mufti. The only coins they carried were of a suspiciously large denomination. A ferryman to whom they gave a silver 20-shilling piece decided they must be noblemen who were going ...”

“... of Britain to pressure the Scots by force of arms into a marriage between his son, Edward, and James V’s daughter, Mary, the infant queen of Scots. This step towards Anglo-Scottish union was designed first to pre-empt a marriage that would strengthen Scotland’s ‘auld alliance’ with France and second to neutralise the north while Henry’s war ...”

“... the maiden’s cheek, and fell upon the faded chintz. You guessed it. Who could it be but Henry James? There would be no shame in your not recognising this as James’s work, however: it has languished in peaceful obscurity for more than 140 years, only now to have its authorship revealed by Floyd Horowitz, recently ...”

“... of treasons drawn up in 1351, it was an offence to ‘compass or imagine the death of our lord the king’. The meaning of these strange words was already archaic in the early 1790s when William Pitt’s Government brought an array of British radical reformers to trial for high treason. The words ‘compass’ and ‘imagine’ had entered the English language ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... school up the road – ever saw, and I appreciated it. Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the ...”

“... The Tower from Within claims the Earl of Dunraven believed his ravens were all the avatars of King Brân the Blessed by which he kept watch over every cantref of Britain. So it was with George. And when he tore the aerials from the Tower Hamlets rooftops he knew his exile irrevocable only as Arthur’s rest in Avalon rex quondam rexque futurus his time ...”

“... blood: the shocking execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and the debilitating nosebleeds of James II, which prevented him from defending his crown at Salisbury against William, his son-in-law as well as his nephew. The caesura comes on 30 January 1649 with the public execution of Charles I. A Dutch pamphleteer punned that the English (Anglorum) could no ...”

“... In March 1776, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather ...”

“... contains the variant readings, with such minute differences of presentation, as compared with James Gibson’s Variorum, as only the aficionado will wish to pore over. The printing, paper and production are in the best style of the Press; the Explanatory Notes are on a discreet scale. It cannot be said that Hardy’s works are of a kind which benefits ...”

“... Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587. English observers, anxious about James VI of Scotland’s reaction to his mother’s execution, were alarmed to discover that the greatest of the Scottish Catholic peers, George Gordon, Sixth Earl of Huntly, was rapidly becoming his chief confidant. In 1588 James arranged Huntly’s marriage to Henrietta Stuart, daughter of his former favourite the Duke of Lennox, thus admitting him into the wider royal family ...”

“... On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York. The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for tickets. The audience was strange; in general in New York an audience is either young or old (in the Lincoln Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell ...”

“... Castle, a plain inscription remembering him as ‘Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’. Greville’s life of Sidney, written in the earlier part of James’s reign, is a study in failure. ‘He never was magistrate, nor possessed of any fit stage for eminence to ...”

“... Five hundred years ago, in autumn 1513, James IV, one of the most effective and attractive of Scotland’s rulers, led an army of unusual size and quality into northern England. The young Henry VIII had embarked on a military expedition in northern France, and Scotland responded to French calls for aid by invading England ...”