“... on Lindisfarne, exposed and undefended, was destroyed without warning by seaborne raiders, the Pearl Harbor of the Dark Ages. Charlemagne’s English minister Alcuin wrote to the survivors in consternation, to say there had never been such a disaster in Britain before, and that no one would have thought such an attack possible. The Viking victory was ...”

“... the 1960s on the last page of Campbell’s hard-eyed reconstruction of the legend, ‘and I am King of the Universe.’ When we met in England, Ginsberg had abdicated another impromptu throne, as King of the May (Kral Majales) in Prague. He had been expelled for taking off his clothes during a reading to his student ...”

“... grows from the records outwards, from the small piece of grit in the Plea Roll to the published pearl. In this respect, Professor Elton is entitled to his identification with his subject. So he is also in stressing their common respect for legal records, without falling into what Elton once called the ‘essentially a-historical’ attitude of lawyers ...”

“... The mourning of old Europe (Europe before the slaughter) and old America (America before Burger King), and the attempt to establish a continuity between these manageable, familial worlds and an ungraspable, strange present, have been preoccupations in his work, and this new collection of stories, five of them, signals no change. ‘Him with his foot in his ...”

“... Iran, who provided them with meals of rice and fish. The delegation was conveyed to the court of King Narai in a caravan of elephants. Muhammad Rabi’ was particularly impressed by the orchards they passed, which contained ‘every sort of fruit tree, lemon, orange, coconut and mango, as well as the betel tree, which for beauty and grace rivals the ...”

“... II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s ...”

“... yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it over the years to get American novelists to jump through hoops. And when she asked Mailer if he’d care to contribute something ...”

“... to meet – leaders of governments-in-exile, naval commanders, bomber pilots, H.G. Wells, the boy-king of Yugoslavia – was made available. Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy ...”

“... But there is no way that Elizabeth swisser-swattered with Sir Walter. She may have liked his pearl earrings and the turned-up beard, and few ageing queens would object to receiving poems comparing them to ‘the valley of Perue/ whose summer ever lasteth’, but she was relatively pragmatic in her affections. Ralegh knew, and she knew, that her principal ...”

“... literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire cloisters for his new castle in California. As one Spanish ...”

“... thriving as a student, and didn’t discover poetry until he entered college the year before Pearl Harbor. Though he took basic training at twenty, Hecht’s division was not deployed until the final months of the war, when it liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany. As he knew some French and German, Hecht was asked to interview the ...”

“... to a private club two years after the ball. The building was torn down just before the attack on Pearl Harbour. There was continuity in Meiji, of course. Both the infatuation with and the fear of the Western world existed before 1868. But even the curiosity for strange customs and dress, displayed in Meiji woodcuts, and the minute descriptions of foreign ...”

“... forth of a prince’, so a single ‘s’ was squeezed in at the end); Elizabeth’s mother-of-pearl locket ring (usually at Chequers); her girlhood translations of English prayers into Latin, Italian and French. While Mary Tudor, her Catholic half-sister, was queen, Elizabeth observed Mass, kept her head down and bided her time. On loan from the National ...”

“... airplanes or yids. Landsman can smell fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grinspoon’s Felting two blocks away. But there are other moments of more universal precision. Berko Shemets, Landsman’s partner, ‘salts an egg and bites it. His teeth leave ...”

“... But even more surprisingly, the riot erupted in Dongguan, a humming industrial city in the Pearl River Delta, the manufacturing hub of southern China. The delta, which has cultural and commercial ties with Hong Kong, is the world’s workshop. Nearly every major Western company dependent on overseas manufacturing sources products in the low-slung ...”