“... to having thought well enough of it to give Banting a room and the services of a medical student, Charles Best, whose principal duty would be to carry out the crucially important job of estimating the concentration of reducing sugars in blood and urine – a simple procedure now that it has been streamlined and virtually automated by the pharmaceutical ...”

“... to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you are not a soldier; you can be of no use to us here.’ ‘Sir,’ answered Godfrey, ‘I run no more hazards than ...”

“... quite natural. There is no jolt, no place to pause and say this is no longer believable. Stephen King considers Jackson one of the great horror writers because she ‘never had to raise her voice’. There are no sudden twists in ‘The Lottery’. It appears to darken gradually, although in fact it does so at remarkable speed. Tessie’s reaction when her ...”

“... It made no more sense than it makes for 20th-century New Yorkers to hanker after being ruled by King Arthur and his knights. Stone’s history is a good deal like Mark Twain’s, and hardly the worse for it either. Still, historical, textual, and interpretative questions will creep in. Did Socrates hanker after a return to aristocratic or monarchical ...”

“... at all: in other words, that the notion of a sustained Parliamentary opposition to James I and Charles I, leading inevitably to a military conflict fought over constitutional principles, cannot be sustained. Indeed, they look with deep suspicion at any notion of inevitability. They admit that the Crown was faced with serious problems – of religious ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...”

“... In 1989, François Furet was frequently hailed (or criticised, depending on the context) as the ‘king’ of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to be everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, and adorning the pages of almost every glossy magazine. Foreign reporters featured him in pieces on the celebration ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... trials of 1794 the charge against Thelwall and his LCS comrades was that of ‘imagining the King’s death’. ‘Imagining’ was medieval legalese for ‘intending’, but in the political hysteria surrounding the trials even regicidal fantasies, expressed or attributed – the ‘levities of imagination’, as John Thelwall wrote, a touch ...”

“... times, with uneven films such as Easy Rider; or for the murders committed in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. Those could be seen as political – one of the motivations was to provoke a race war – but the horrifying character of Manson and the celebrity of some of the victims were what caught most people’s attention. The fascination with the episode ...”

“... more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an ...”

“... The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in July 1954, The Two Towers in November and The Return of the King almost a year later, in October 1955. Lewis wrote a dust-jacket puff: ‘No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its inner laws.’ You do not have to admire the book to think that this was true. It is clear from ...”

“... autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within which, according to the curriculum and the powers that be, everybody lived happily doing various things in various sorts of traditional dress.In the sitting room at home, the man on the radio who ...”

“... Lionel Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration ...”

“... her heart wasn’t in becoming a professional, and she never did. Even her two-part affair with King Farouk (the second instalment encouraged by Connolly) doesn’t put her in the professional category. There were no spectacular pickings. After leaving her father’s best friend Skelton earned her living by modelling for the London couturiers, and eked it ...”