“... 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 ...”

“... is capable of drawing a line from, say, the Warburgian theorising of the retired cavalry officer Richard Lefebvre des Noëttes to the biopolitics of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse ...”

“... on everything from pizzas and central locking to multiple phone extensions, ejector seats and king and queen-size beds. As a detective you have to watch your step, in order that your operations remain clandestine, and no detectives in literature have ever watched their steps as literally as Okotie’s two detectives. Much of the first novel is taken up ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... woman, Cosima, wife of his young protégé Hans von Bülow, and he has found a loyal patron, the King of Bavaria. On the last page he hears of the death of his old enemy, the German-born Parisian composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. Wendelin Weissheimer, a minor German composer and Wagner groupie, provides the epitaph by ‘bursting out into harsh laughter at the ...”

“... History: You can go back as far as you like, to Roderick O’Connor, the last High King of Ireland, who in 1175 surrendered to the King of England. Or, if Northern Ireland is locally in question, to the 17th-century Plantations of Ulster, the immediate occasion of our divisions. Thereafter, as Catholic ...”

“... court, parliament and the law, and it is strange to have such cultural nationalism ascribed to a king whose ostensible war-aim was to be king of France. Mr Johnson’s nationalism has other unfortunate results. As befits a historian who began his account of English national identity with the heresy of a Welsh monk, Mr ...”

“... is cut up like a bullock at Smith field,’ he merely commented that he had now seen a king beheaded and that king avenged. Many other sights were to drive him to anger or disgust, but in this entry he was being studiously hard-boiled, as if with an eye to leaving a crisp morsel for the historian. In his 1974 ...”

“... then ‘Audrey pointed to one of Elizabeth’s enormous jewels and asked: “Kenny Lane?” “No, Richard Burton,” replied Taylor, and both stars screamed with laughter.’ It blows my mind – I don’t know a more proper way to say it – to imagine Hepburn pointing to Taylor’s jewels, as if the two were simply women at a party, not symbolic figures ...”

“... In​ 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice ...”

“... himself disciplining those members of his flock who were influenced by Tom Paine or by the prophet Richard Brothers (‘God’s nephew’). He published one tract entitled The Moral Law not Injured by the Everlasting Gospel. That might seem to take us closer to Blake but in fact it does not, since if Blake had written such a tract its title would have been ...”

“... Voltaire’s Zadig, and the authorities of Babylon in the mystery of the sacred horse of the king and the queen’s respectable dog. Clues, then, if they are to be fair, must fall within that area of common knowledge the validity of which a judge in court feels free to take into judicial notice: things so generally known to be true that evidence need not ...”

“... actions. The thrust of Sidney’s argument was anti-monarchical, though he accepted that if a king were controlled by laws, then a kingdom might still resemble a free state. Cato’s Letters, a highly influential series of articles published in the London Journal by the Whig writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and which first appeared as a ...”

“... Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from both right and left to rough up the bourgeois middle. What can one do with a once-loyal Marxist who ...”