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“... dedicated to statesmen, administrators, scholars and generals, we find unforgettable portraits of knights-errant and assassins, the male favourites of certain emperors, diviners and fortune-tellers, humourists and those adept at making money. Sima Qian had remarkable dignity and moral courage. Born to a scholarly family of high status – his father also had ...”

“... right-wingery would do the nation a power of good – without, of course, overstepping the mark, like Hitler and Streicher, because some of the Guinnesses’ best friends are Jews, nowadays ... The Guinnesses don’t know where to draw the line. They are constantly, wince-makingly, overstepping the mark which divides ...”

“... obtrusive: Serre has described her narrators as being ‘armed’ and ‘valiant’, like medieval knights. They switch between the imperious passé simple and idiomatic phrases like ‘ma foi’ (my word). Sometimes she summons up a listener to comment on the narration: ‘Let’s not debate this forever,’ one teases, after quibbling about a word ...”

“... to her and she wrote back. Then I left Deutsch to join Queen Magazine. They wanted me because of Mark Boxer, the Art Director, who had become a great friend. There was a sort of troika: Jocelyn Stevens, who’d bought it, Mark Boxer and Beatrix Miller, who was brought in as the editor, and who later edited Vogue. She was ...”

“... a childhood home (which anxious inhabitants fear they may reclaim) have a sense of return. In the Mark Brandenburg they find a country-side without commercial gloss, of crumbling barns and crooked houses in cobbled villages. The Elbe may be Europe’s biggest sewer, but the cherry trees flower in the pine woods. Towns seem reassuring as well as strange; one ...”

“... site of James Stirling’s Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart. Swabian aristocrats dressed up as crusading knights and Saracens to stage a tourney using original weapons, complete with pages, squires and a back-drop of lemon trees especially imported for the occasion. This was life imitating Sir Walter Scott, an outcrop of Romanticism and the desire of rulers to ...”

“... Young’s 1958 satire The Rise of the Meritocracy. But the only thing significantly off the mark about his dystopian predictions is that his narrator is saying these things, as opposed to merely thinking them. Mount’s Uppers do, broadly speaking, think that they have all the things they have because they deserve them. As for the Downers, it’s hard ...”

“... foundling hospitals and nuns succoured the sick and the mad in hospices attached to shrines; Knights Hospitallers on battlefields, and the confraternities burying plague victims, provided other kinds of care. Ideally, such a relation between people and places could be regenerated today in the modern cities of the West, though Sennett does not hold out ...”

“... detail she said something in Russian which she told me was from a poem by Pushkin, about thirty knights coming up out of the water with their sea-tutor. When the war began she was 16, and at the Smolny, an old convent which was a school for young ladies. Later on its buildings had become the headquarters of the Bolshevik party. The girls had been at home ...”

“... attitude we relish in Falstaff and Toby Belch, whose roguery is spiced by the fact that they are knights of the realm. They can knock around with the lower orders because hierarchy means nothing to those at the apex of it. It is the lower-middle-class Malvolios of this world who have a jealous eye to social distinction. When Belch declares, ‘I’ll confine ...”

“... City, ensconced in medieval hostel-cum-boutique hotel formerly occupied by those nutty-crusader Knights of St John. (A few grim-faced Saracens, too, no doubt – especially after Suleiman the Magnificent’s successful siege of Rhodes in 1522.) Cobbled streets around the fortress awash in the fanatic blood of centuries, but we’re in a holiday ...”

“... hours a day in hell, the corpses of unbaptised infants being staked down to prevent them walking, knights with demonic servitors who work without pay just because they enjoy being near people, like the soulless longaevi of fairy-tale. How did this relate, one wonders, to Hermann of Carinthia or Thierry of Chartres? Closely, says Gurevitch. Dialogue with the ...”

“... 1980s and 1990s, in a series of books and articles based on extensive work in the record sources, Mark Ormrod argued vigorously that Edward had been a conscientious, ‘hands-on king’ who successfully asserted royal authority. It is not Mortimer’s intention to enter into these debates or to examine Edward’s government in any detail. This is a narrative ...”

“... been the richest man in Europe in the early 16th century. German armour was particularly prized by knights and princes all over Europe. On the battlefield, German mercenaries, the Landsknechte, were notoriously brutal; at a time when national allegiances were weak, they didn’t mind which side they fought on so long as they were paid. By the 18th ...”

“... and details of the figure match the monk’s story, including the fully shaven head that is the mark of a lay brother rather than a tonsured initiate. We know that both Charles V and Philip II employed a clockmaker, the Italian-Spanish engineer Juanelo Turriano, who is said to have built other automata. Turriano was by all accounts a technical genius. The ...”