“... was born in June 1948, which makes him the same age as Ian McEwan and a few months older than King Charles. Like McEwan, he spent his earliest years in Tripoli – his father, like McEwan’s, was posted there as a British army officer – and was sent back aged eleven to an England still shaped by the war, for a boarding school education at the ...”

“... from the educational Puritan ‘godly books’ Swift might possibly have read as a child, to Charles I’s imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight (Sir William Temple, Swift’s patron, briefly toured there in 1648 as a young man). Sometimes, the awareness of gaps and things missing leads to provocative conjectures: might the odd absence ...”

“... In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent virtues of failure), Charles Nicholl unearths more detail and offers more seductive speculation than any previous writer. With the vigorous Return of the Subject that besets many contemporary historians, he also can’t resist elbowing to the forefront with a Channel 4 expedition to ...”

“... Depression-era murder story as its subject. It ‘will be compared to In Cold Blood’, Stephen King suggests in his blurb on the back cover, and provides ‘documentary evidence’, Colm Tóibín says, ‘of rural America in a time of crisis’ – a kind of new, new journalism then. Developing her interest in merging factual circumstance with the invented ...”

“... are comforted. Above all, they are grateful to have been born in a free country, where the only king is God, and ‘the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endow you with a right to life and liberty.’ When the first Little House book was published in 1932, Wilder was 65. Until then, she had written only short essays about her life in the Ozarks for the ...”

“... read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were displeased about corpses being committed to their snows by English clergymen – Switzerland was not yet an English colony, though beginning to look like one – and the bodies were reinterred at ...”

“... being served. The Quarto text sounds like Stephen Rea, the modernised one like Gielgud or Prince Charles. The same or very similar modernised texts in Katherine Duncan-Jones’s scholarly and accessible new edition seem perfectly presentable on their own, but in Vendler are often destabilised by their immediate adjacency to the Quarto texts. Duncan-Jones ...”

“... and while the children entering that school can surely tell you something about Martin Luther King Jr, and probably about Malcolm X too, I wonder what they know of the man for whom their school is named. The Columbia undergraduates up the street, who read W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk in the Plato-to-Arendt ‘great books’ course mandatory ...”

“... Conservative MP for York, hence a more successful politician. He was slightly to the right of Sir Charles Oman, the other historian MP of the early 20th century. They are now both forgotten, as no doubt I shall be in a few years. I think my books are better than Marriott’s but that is probably because they are more left-wing – or are they? A comment on my ...”

“... hinged double set, trying to throw the baby Jesus across the intervening frame at the kneeling king on the left? And why was I supposed to care about the mustard-coloured pot on the mustard-coloured table with the mustard-coloured dead sunflowers in it? Pictures were another matter. You could imagine living with pictures; my parents’ house had pictures ...”

“... beside her on the bed. Esther before Ahasuerus (c.1628-30) is pure theatre, depicting the Persian king anachronistically decked out in full commedia dell’arte costume and framed by a red stage curtain; the fainting Esther is washed out not only by her days of fasting but also by the riot of colour that surrounds her. A similar stage curtain appears in ...”

“... their church windows, and cared not a fart for any orders of the Parliament not confirmed by the king. Images were not only objects of belief: they were visible symbols of the unity of communities, and an unsuccessful symbol of unity is a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the ...”

“... retirement dinner, though of course on such occasions one is not on oath. White’s successor was Charles Osborne, whose sins as assistant director Goodman here attributes to the influence of White, though I very much doubt if Osborne, who has always known how to look after himself, would agree. The unsuccessful candidate was the late George MacBeth. The ...”

“... had been the Duke of Windsor’s mistress before marriage and that England’s recently abdicated king sometimes drank too much. A writ was served and the action heard before the Lord Chief Justice, who declared in court that ‘these particular libels, a jury might think, appear almost to invite a thoroughly efficient horse-whipping.’ Author and publisher ...”

“... own was simply taken from Machiavelli’s Discourses. When Drake comments on the Old Testament king Jehu, Sharpe supposes his remarks to be about Christ. Sharpe’s grasp of the mid-century political background likewise seems insecure. One of his themes is the impact on Drake’s reading of the political events around him. Attitudes which he had formed ...”