“... boys; both Jewish; both were ladled with mother-love as sons, Mailer fussed over as ‘the little king’ and Podhoretz doted on by the women in his family as destiny’s darling, cooing over ‘the blue of my eyes, at the thick curliness of my hair, at the streak of grey on its side (proof, they said, echoing an ancient superstition, that I was among the ...”

“... asserts its status. A fatter, lusher and therefore more significant account than James King’s 1991 William Blake, His Life. King doesn’t have such a subversive programme – though he casts a sharper eye on the motives of men like John Linnell, whom he depicts as a hustling opportunistic businessman as well ...”

“... the Muslim armies profited from the unpopul-arity of the ruling Visigoths. In July, Tarik defeated King Roderic, and the local population flocked to join the army that had rid them of an oppressive ruler. By the autumn, Córdoba and Toledo had both fallen. As it became clear that Tarik was determined to take the whole peninsula, an envious Musa bin Nusayr left ...”

“... the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper with Diana Cooper and she told him that she and her husband had had the adjoining cabin to the royal couple (or rather one royal, the other not) and that she had had her ear pressed ...”

“... Massacre of the Innocents, with its mother vainly trying to protect her son from one of King Herod’s soldiers, her mouth ‘torn open in a scream’.Bacon said little about his time in and around Paris, but it allowed him to learn the language and make useful connections. At the end of 1928 he moved to London, where he grew close to a number of ...”

“... school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and masculine (agreeing in gender with Rex), because ‘the masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine, and the feminine more worthy than the neuter.’ (In ...”

“... and people drop their hard-earned cash into his plastic cup. For dirty, greasy-haired Dave, 19, is king of the hard-faced professional beggars working Central London.’These reports – with their penny-dreadful conflation of begging with theft, social security fraud and gang-violence – have taken their toll in public wariness. People are increasingly ...”

“... idea of subtler minds. It is, he writes, clear-cut: Lightborn ‘pretends to seduce the faggot king, and then gives him what every faggot needs: a red-hot poker up the arse’. Any audience would have understood this. The first 126 Sonnets are, for the most part, filled with a desire which is artful and playful and almost light: Marlowe’s version of ...”

“... and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against ...”

“... Liverpool Street Station, transformed between 1985 and 1991 into one of those termini where, as Martin Amis sneered a few years later in The Information, the trains have become an awkward adjunct to the business of retail and catering. ‘The old Liverpool Street,’ Bradley counters, ‘was a dirty, baffling place’: The 1991 incarnation with its ...”

“... fearful of going down with him after the Allies landed in Sicily. After a brief interval, the king fled with Badoglio, the conqueror of Ethiopia, to the South, where the Allies put them atop an unaltered regional administration, while in the North the Germans set up Mussolini at the head of a puppet regime in Salò. When the war came to an end, Italy was ...”

“... tabulated. He noted the many terms for scrofula that were commonly used in Ireland: ‘The Evil, King’s Evil, The Running Evil, Running Sore, Felloon, Bone Evil, Glandular Disease, an Impostume; in Irish Easbaidh bragadh, deficiency in the neck; Fiolun, the treacherous disease; Cneadh Cnaithneach, the wasting ulcer; Cuit bragach, cuts in the ...”

“... Weber on. ‘You can’t just do that! This is why universities need walls!’It’s striking, as Martin Jay writes in an afterword to Marxist Modernism, that despite Rose’s great interest and expertise in Marx and in Frankfurt Marxism, she worked ‘entirely outside’ the great debates on the intellectual left of the 1980s. Althusser she ‘only ...”

“... and market reform is questionable.’ A robuster brand of optimism was expressed by the late Martin Malia. Author of The Soviet Tragedy – a passionate requisitory of Bolshevism from the liberal right, ideologically parallel to François Furet’s Past of an Illusion (the two were close friends), but intellectually everything it is not, a work of ...”

“... that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna Ali. They all went to Falafel King afterwards to have lemonade. They just sat at the window watching the world go by, and they discussed Ramadan. Naseem promised to come to Grenfell Tower so they could break their fast together and make her famous cheese pie. ‘It had been such a big iftar ...”