“... 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 ...”

“... John Mortimer QC – representing two of the editors and arguing issues of law, while the other, Richard Neville, represented himself and said things that lawyers were not permitted to say (though Mortimer was at his fluent best when not talking about the law, which he generally found either confusing or boring). But nothing availed against the combined ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In 1843, the artist Richard Dadd murdered his father and was put away in Bethlem Hospital, Britain’s oldest lunatic asylum; his portrait of the alienist Sir Alexander Morison stares from the cover of Masters of Bedlam, gauntly silhouetted against a mottled sky. He seems to be looking at something he finds hard to bear ...”

“... There was even rain ‘Yorkshiring down with vertical vengeance’. Myers’s first proper novel, Richard (2010), was about the Manic Street Preachers lyricist and guitarist Richey Edwards, who went missing after leaving a London hotel in 1995 on the eve of the band’s US tour. Two weeks after his disappearance, his car was found at a motorway service ...”

“... significant that Melville makes a point of mentioning it. These two earlier illicit lovers betray King Arthur doubly, as both husband and ruler. So do Francesca and Paolo betray Giovanni Malatesta, since he is husband to the one and elder brother to the other. It is their exposure to an actual text of the Lancelot-Guenevere story that induces, according to ...”

“... could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the wretched Richard Gott recently managed, on a smaller scale, to do), waited until 1982 to publish his book After Long Silence. It told the usual story: the high excitement of the Thirties; the precedence given in Cambridge circles to young men of background and pelf who ...”