“... need to communicate them to the reader. Another minor annoyance is the lack of graciousness to H.J.R. Murray, whose great History of Chess of 1913 must be the basis for any subsequent research, and to which Eales’s debt is necessarily great. A handsome tribute in the Introduction does not compensate for the impression given by the text, in which Murray is ...”

“... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied politics at ...”

“... dismissing it as ‘speculative’. After Nealon’s conviction was quashed, the then chair, Richard Foster, apologised and promised the CCRC would do everything it could to prevent anything similar from happening in the future.In 2010, Bob Woffinden wrote in the Guardian that ‘the CCRC has become characterised by pusillanimity and procrastination. It ...”

“... Simone’s singing broadcast not just a new sound but a new time. Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole – great black song stylists who emerged out of the 1940s and crossed over into the commercial white mainstream – succeeded precisely because their tone and diction took race out of their voices; they swung but without soul, which made the songs and ...”

“... with the emphases of Jonson’s The Forest, where the country is praised ‘as an image of the King’s peace’. When set beside ‘anti-courtly’ Spenserian verse, ‘To Penshurst’ and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ ‘give the sense of a nation which, whatever its faults, is essentially harmonious and well-ordered and reflects credit on its ...”

“... elaborately presented. In the great tournament ordered by Henry VIII in 1511, for example, the king and three companions, presenting themselves as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and ...”

“... W e have​ the king’s own word for the massacre. He ordered it, after all. In a royal charter Ethelred recalled that ‘a decree was sent out by me, with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockles among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination ...”

“... satires is the cartoon showing just two sombre figures, Edmund Burke and the Reverend Dr Richard Price. It was Price’s republican sermon ‘On the Love of Our Country’ that had given Burke the pretext for his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Gillray entitled his double portrait Smelling out a Rat; – or – the Atheistical-Revolutionist ...”

“... communal feeling, multiculturalism and musical attunement to the ecosphere. These are the views of Richard King, who is responsible for the Afrocentrist pages on the World Wide Web. Not myself a devotee, I can only quote the electronic address at which surfers should be able to check for themselves: http://www.melanet.com/melanet/ubus/melib.html In a ...”

“... its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in ...”

“... east using the logogrammatic sign NIM. In Akkadian cuneiform, it was referred to as Elamtu. After King Ashurbanipal’s library in Nineveh was discovered in 1853, there was no longer any doubt. The Babylonian records were full of wars with the Elamites. Linear Elamite writing was used at least from the reign of ...”

“... stood, queens, princes, heathen courtiers, and in some dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little ...”

“... Richardson give an account of the poet greeting an attack by Colley Cibber, who was to be crowned King of the Dunces in the final version of The Dunciad. I have heard Mr Richardson relate that he attended his father the painter on a visit, when one of Cibber’s pamphlets came into the hands of Pope, who said, ‘These things are my diversion.’ They sat by ...”

“... unashamed fan of minor Hollywood pictures. Breathless, as Godard readily admitted, was inspired by Richard Quine’s Pushover and could be seen as the direct sequel to Otto Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder ...”

“... especially technical words, regardless of the language. Chaucer, taking over as clerk of the king’s works, was given an inventory of dead stock at the Tower of London that included ‘i ramme cum toto apparatu excepta i drawying corda que frangitur et devastatur, i fryingpanne, i lathe pro officio carpentarii’: a battering-ram with a winding-cord too ...”