“... inherited the commitment to a devolved parliament in Edinburgh from his predecessor as leader, John Smith, and Donald Dewar, who would become first minister in Holyrood in 1999. Although there wasn’t the same investment in devolution in the Welsh Labour Party, the MP for Caerphilly, Ron Davies, managed to persuade Blair that proposals for a Welsh ...”

“... Harrison told not one but two stories about Henry VII. ‘As the report goeth’, he wrote, the king had had all the mastiffs in England put to death because ‘they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereigne’. And again, ‘as some saie’, the king had ...”

“... but I can’t quite see a Jesuit pulling off something similar – though on a smaller scale John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits (1993) isn’t a bad shot. I’m struck by the fact that the most powerful contribution made by an English historian to Jesuit history, Outram Evennett’s Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (1968) was written by a person who ...”

“... crowned and enthroned, which still survives in Westminster Abbey. Painted in the 1390s, when the king was in his twenties, it gives him a slightly boyish, even feminine appearance, with red cheeks, full lips and a small goatee beard. Much of this, however, is the work of 19th-century restorers: when the portrait is viewed under infrared reflectography, the ...”

“... In the spring of 1604, the English were adjusting to the arrival of King James from Scotland, attending to the doings of his first Parliament, and awaiting the arrival of envoys from the King of Spain to negotiate an end to twenty years of war. Peace, even with the Scots, was in the air ...”

“... instantly have sniffed out the scientific balderdash. The defence – provocatively stated by John Sturrock in these pages – was that humanities journals don’t work that way. In return for their services to the academy, science journals have traditionally demanded exclusive copyright from authors. This allows the publisher to control and charge for ...”

“... position was itself almost as hazardous as those of the characters in the poem, although King Charles, whose favourite poem was Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, loved nothing more than a pungent pro-Establishment satire, and Dryden was well aware that – colleges on bounteous kings depend, And never rebel was to arts a friend. The friend whose ...”

“... could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king.’Parmy Olson’s lively Supremacy is essentially positive about Altman, whereas Keach Hagey’s thorough and clear-headed The Optimist is more equivocal. She makes Graham’s remark sound light-hearted, joshing and essentially complimentary. Karen Hao’s ...”

“... us in Justice rival ancient ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it ...”

“... invited), and a jolly good party (to which he was) at the College of Heralds with Garter Principal King of Arms, where the forthcoming full-colour photofacsimile of Domesday Book was advertised by Publications Alecto. Meanwhile, in the Great Hall at Winchester, the Phillimore edition was exhibited, and the Alecto facsimile again advertised, in the very place ...”

“... of Westminster attracted a string of Saxon royal grants, but it was the last undisputed Saxon king of England, Edward the Confessor, who firmly established the Abbey’s national status. Edward had spent most of his first forty years in political exile in Normandy. On becoming king he chose Westminster as the site of an ...”

“... When John Berryman’s first full-length collection of poems, The Dispossessed, was published in 1948, Yvor Winters wrote a notice of it for the Hudson Review. Here Winters drew attention to Berryman’s ‘disinclination to understand and discipline his emotions’, and went on to suggest: ‘Most of his poems appear to deal with a single all-inclusive topic: the desperate chaos, social, religious, philosophical and psychological, of modern life, and the corresponding chaos and desperation of John Berryman ...”

“... reading. Archer and Jockers are interested in the pumpkin plants – writers like Stephen King, John Grisham and Danielle Steel, perennial presences on the New York Times bestseller list – and what makes them sell so well. By looking only at textual features their machine has isolated the essence of the ...”

“... a blizzard on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and ...”

“... claim to be remembered for his efforts in securing democracy, freedom of speech and fairness was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur Cash’s informative and enjoyable new biography. Now that ‘high politics’ is taught less and less in schools and universities, Wilkes’s great political achievements, which included lowering the tone of high politics, are ...”