“... more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an antiquated system of common law and rationalised a diffuse system of mercantile law; he drafted statutes; he played a central role in politics as cabinet member, counsellor and confidant; he knew everyone from Boswell ...”

“... feelings. ‘Ambivalence has to be distinguished from having mixed feelings about someone,’ Charles Rycroft writes in his appropriately entitled A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis: ‘It refers to an underlying emotional attitude in which the contradictory attitudes derive from a common source and are interdependent, whereas mixed feelings may be ...”

“... Isaac Casaubon, Mayerne sought, and received, sanctuary at the court of the British philosopher-king James VI and I, where erudition was prized over orthodoxy – or indeed decorum. England was to be Mayerne’s de facto home for the rest of his life. The wars of religion had injected a crucial element of paranoia into court life. Kings and leading ...”

“... son-in-law Ali, venerated by Shiites as the first imam. In 1649, not long after the execution of Charles I, the first English translation of the Quran appeared. Its Royalist translator had intended to dedicate the book to the king, as Matthew Dimmock noted in Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English ...”

“... routine question on ‘just cause and impediment’. And those equally ‘literary’ figures of Charles and Di, the gallant prince leading his innocent young bride to the altar, provide an image of romance that still manages to support even the cheapest shotgun wedding. Surprisingly, Rubinstein found no place in her anthology for this royal epitome of ...”

“... Meanwhile her husband trained periodically with a reserve squadron of the SAS. Prince Charles, who steered the Benjamin Bowring on her first lap, may have wished that his own tours in support of trade and the flag could be organised with similar lack of protocol. An unsparing account of old-fashioned princely progresses is to be found in The ...”

“... new Spanish conservatism. Another indication of the progress of democracy in Spain is that the King played little more than a formal role in the government changeover. Fifteen years ago, Juan Carlos was instrumental in cutting short a military coup that threatened to crush Spain’s newly won democracy; and by this act alone, overcame the suspicions of ...”

“... too single, the dramatic images miss their mark. ‘What, into this?’ The words are those of the king of infinite space up against his nutshell, the ‘etherial spirit of man’ as Carlyle put it, up against ‘two or three feet of sorry tripe full of–’, the voice of whatever it is in us which in love, in religion and in ill health, sees itself as ...”

“... xeroxed scriptures at the urging of his host, the late Chief Jack Naiva. In the one he picked, the King, tall and strong, a hero from Wolwatu (World War Two), was sailing around the southwestern coast of Tanna, and gazed sadly out to shore. When his wife, Kwin Lisbet, asked him what was wrong, he pointed to a rock in the distance known as Nuaru, a name meaning ...”

“... an out-of-date beau and a not-yet-in-date subject of the once in a while and future king whom Henry James will christen Edward the Caresser. And at the centre of the novel is Professor Horace Nettleship, banked and glowering, a man whose geological hammer has chipped away his deity, and who is deep-seatedly obsessed with the monstrous ...”

“... as models. The theologian Pierre de Bérulle, consoling Henrietta Maria, then on her way to wed Charles I in the desert of Protestant England, offered Mary Magdalene as an example, maintaining that she came from a good family (as did St John before he abandoned society) and was of irreproachable character – not a prostitute at all. Both had given up the ...”

“... came to Lebanon as a soldier in 1920, he tells them; his regiment advanced on Damascus to depose King Feisal. The French defeat of Feisal’s army at the Maysaloun Pass brought to an end the prospect of post-Ottoman Arab unity and independence. It also set the stage for the civil war that his listeners were then waging. ‘I took part in many other ...”

“... jurist who served on the Court during the country’s brief moment of independence under King Faisal in 1920. Later, he wrote a book on the French Mandate that robbed Syria of its independence. Jacques said that his family could not just walk away from all this. Things were getting better in Syria, he believed, but he feared that American ...”

“... with an extraordinary feat of imagination. The utterances of Uriel and Madimi, of El and Il and King Carmara and scores of other spirits, are not voicings from the spirit-world, but improvised dramatic monologues performed by Kelley. Most of it is high-sounding esoteric flannel, but often the words have a strange rolling beauty: ‘I will hold up his house ...”

“... fables and fairy tales. His Pinocchio begins: Once upon a time there was . . . ‘A king!’ my little readers will say at once.   No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood. In that sense Pinocchio has more in common with those postmodern children’s books in which nursery stories are upturned – The Stinky ...”