“... are retired you can’t blame anyone else if there is a vacancy around you. ‘Every old man is a King Lear,’ said Goethe, and Lear planned a highly self-regarding scenario for his life after he gave up work. What about an old woman, what stereotype does she resemble? Larkin would mutter about ratbags, but then Larkin got a lot of fun out of bemoaning the ...”

“... Melbourne in the days of what now seems the old innocent Australia, when there were pictures of King George in every living-room, and on winter nights ‘mallee roots’ were burnt in the open grate. Distant and unpeopled except by Aborigines, Mallee had become a desert owing to the extraction of these giant old eucalypts, and a dark red rain from its ...”

“... powers. Cut Tennyson and Browning off at that age and we would have neither The Idylls of the King nor The Ring and the Book. A more convincing explanation of his poetic block is found in a late conversation poem, ‘Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoon’. Wandering with a friend in Hyde Park, Arnold asks why there are so few ‘real successes’ in ...”

“... of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. As Wotton is ‘walking the pavements of Venice, King James will be there with him’. Wotton’s innate theatricality rendered his diplomacy unpredictable and endears him to the author. Writing predominantly in the historical present, Rutter chaperones readers along Venetian alleys and invites them to ‘look ...”

“... of his expenses claims. Now he discovers that there is an article by one of his predecessors, John Major, which attacks him in highly personal terms. He decides he must ring the Telegraph’s editor to put the record straight. He has to do this on a train to Bradford, where he is due to unveil a memorial in honour of a local police officer, Sharon ...”

“... laws, to fight a duel’. The editorial lamented that affairs of state should be entrusted by the king ‘to persons whose intemperate passions were so little under the control of reason’. So it proved. Canning recovered from his wound but both men had to resign public office. No glamour or romance attached to the incident, which was regarded as ...”

“... In January​ 1904, King Leopold II of Belgium was invited to Berlin to attend a birthday dinner for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The two monarchs were seated next to each other and everything was going nicely until the Kaiser suddenly brought up the question of a possible future French attack on Germany. In the event of a war between Germany and France, Wilhelm explained, he would expect the Belgians to side with Germany ...”

“... be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal power.In 1685 the Duke of York, who had been brought up in ...”

“... 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the ...”

“... Polis Centre spent ten years (from 1993 to 2003) charting and analysing 1035 city-states. John Ma’s book, in some respects a monumental update of A.M.H. Jones’s The Greek City (1940), draws on the Copenhagen research as well as decades of work by French epigraphists such as Philippe Gauthier and Louis Robert on the vast number of inscriptions left ...”

“... wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing knee breeches when meeting the king, except MacDonald, who was ‘very dignified and distinguished in his Privy Counsellor’s full dress uniform’. When MacDonald died in 1937, Channon said he had been happy ‘only after 1931, when he had carted his old followers, and could breathe freely ...”

“... boring Holloway to good old Peckham on the south side of the river, nearer the centre of things. John Jensen’s illustrations match Weedon Grossmith’s very neatly. Carrie thought the Pooters’ house rather too near the railway line, and deemed her husband’s jolly friend, Gowing, a touch too bibulous: to express her point of view, Jensen has embellished ...”

“... in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the diarist had used, but he was a ...”

“... as a narrative by rendering a complex story comprehensible. Ludendorff, Von Kluck, Joffre, Sir John French, King Albert of Belgium – all come, in Tuchman’s portrayal, to embody the characteristics of the nations to which they belong. We feel that we are seeing a modern morality play re-enacted before our ...”

“... flair for building up the large social picture, and the same amplitude is there in his new book, King of the Badgers, with the addition of a genre element, which intermittently brings it close to crime thriller territory. The setting is the seaside town of Hanmouth, a genteel Devon resort with an underclass hinterland, bearing enough resemblance to Topsham ...”