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“... personal identification which disavow personality. Take, for instance, a poem from the collection King Log (1968), subtitled ‘A Valediction to Osip Mandelstam’, and entitled ‘Tristia: 1891-1938’. It is quoted in full: Difficult friend, I would have preferred You to them. The dead keep their sealed lives And again I am too late. Too late The ...”

“... Ghosn is clearly in his element. And just in case anyone doubts it, a dancer dressed as the Sun King himself in plumed Apollo outfit takes up position behind Ghosn at the centre of the table, bowing to his latter-day avatar with an elaborate flourish. What need for anyone else from the alliance, you can almost hear Ghosn thinking. L’alliance c’est ...”

“... make common cause with the green welly brigade. Where can the royalist papers go, when the future king has made it clear he thinks GM stinks? Whither the papers that once held to the idea of progress on behalf of all mankind, and science addressing the world’s problems, when biology has been privatised? None of these books is British or about Britain, but ...”

“... help of the European powers, which later provided a Bavarian teenager as the country’s first king (the Greek parliament sits in what was his palace); Greece’s first political parties were aligned with English, Russian and French interests. After the Second World War, the US ensured that Greece wouldn’t fall under Soviet influence by enlisting it as a ...”

“... most unchanging thing about them. (As it was, one might add, the most unchanging thing about poor James Boswell, another great vita nuova man, ever inclined to exhort himself: ‘Be Samuel Johnson! Be the rock of Gibraltar!’) All the same, despite Svevo’s rule, there have been a few people – Tolstoy, Wittgenstein and D.H. Lawrence come to mind – who ...”

“... of these.’) In Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster was similarly uncowed by the shadow of Henry James, taking swipes at James’s disciple Percy Lubbock and implying that it was silly to get hung up on doctrines of ‘economy and architecture’. You could arrange a story in the shape of an hourglass, as Forster said ...”

“... had on ideas of the self in psychology and literature. Pamela Thurschwell’s fine study of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and George du Maurier1 showed how profoundly the developments in ‘magical thinking’ reverberated in fiction and its portrayal of character and perception; and Malcolm Gaskill recently tackled, with amused brio, the life and times of the ...”

“... On 12 March 1689, James II, the deposed king of England and Ireland, Catholic and absolutist, landed at Kinsale on the south coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England a few months before when William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns – the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution ...”

“... on both sides of 1660, when he was 39, but the start of his career as an MP a year before the king’s return did seem to have marked a shift from the poet to the politician. It could be explained by the drying up of poetic inspiration in middle age; or by the superannuation of his metaphysical technique as the ordered classicism of the Restoration ...”

“... father and Coburg grandfather, where he joined a duelling fraternity, mixed with officers of the King’s Hussars stationed in the town, and found himself surrounded by flatterers. He also imbibed the German-nationalist message of the historian Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, which bolstered his already well-developed sense of Hohen-zollern destiny. As he approached ...”

“... herbarium and mineral and zoological collections, he passed the letter on to the young James Smith, who happened to be taking breakfast with him, and suggested he ask his father to buy them for him. Mr Smith obliged, and the Linnean Society was born. But against this – and by that time Banks was much engaged with other business – one can set ...”

“... days before Parliament demanded the seizure of all those who had sat in judgment on the former king. Harris’s novel begins with their arrival in America in July that year. Events in New England are interspersed with chapters imagining ministerial discussions in Whitehall, the plight of Goffe’s family in London and the arrest of fellow regicides on the ...”

“... spent on the writing itself) might be bad for them? Giles Foden’s first two novels, The Last King of Scotland, about Idi Amin’s Uganda, and the Boer War-set Ladysmith, seemed, though far from flawless, almost effortlessly distinctive and intelligent; and while his third, the self-consciously terse, thrillerish Zanzibar, was less impressive, it is with ...”

“... his collateral descendant Oliver (also no slouch at creating ruins). Amid much that is familiar, James Clark’s absorbing and formidable study presents much that is refreshingly new, as might be expected after a lifetime of scholarly work on late medieval English monastic life. Clark corrects the common impression that monasteries in their last 150 years of ...”

“... between master and servant provided a template for almost every kind of affiliation: between king and courtier, ruler and subject, patron and client, commander and soldier, employer and apprentice, or even between husband and wife, parent and child, mistress and lover. ‘Trust and service’, a character in Middleton’s The Witch (c.1616) declares, are ...”