“... Hitler’s weren’t awkward enough, the script of Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film had to cut the king’s threats to allow his troops to rape and pillage at Harfleur, his orders for the killing of prisoners of war at Agincourt, and the Chorus’s parting admission that Henry’s short-lived territorial gains proved futile, with his reign being followed by ...”

“... black mamba’. Nabokov responded by putting Hingley into the translation (heavily revised) of King, Queen, Knave as a department store mannequin – a literal blockhead. The odd thing is that, in addition to a critical study, Hingley was reviewing Speak, Memory, book which, like Pnin, displays Nabokov’s humanity at its most engaging. His private manner ...”

“... of a coal merchant from Transylvania, Johan Petrus Hornung, who anglicised his name to John Peter. Willie was sent off to be thoroughly Englished at Uppingham School, then under the headship of the magnetic Edward Thring. Hornung loved everything about the school – the headmaster, the classics, the ethos of muscular Christianity and above all the ...”

“... in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to know about Our Bridge. It’s a solid job; it almost bankrupted its British ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... the talent for comedy revealed in her letters. Staying in Rye with Alec Vidler, former dean of King’s College, Cambridge, who was helping her with research for The Knox Brothers, she described the house party to her daughter: a trendy cleric, his dull wife, a long-skirted daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to ...”

“... no fewer than 6.2 million working-class electors had voted for Churchill in 1951, how was it, as Peter Shore was plaintively to ask in a Labour Party pamphlet of 1952, that so many who were neither wealthy nor privileged had been recruited to a cause which was not their own? The answers, at the individual level, are many and various. Family ...”

“... and portraitists of high society, von Stuck, von Lenbach, those habitual dinner guests of the king of Bavaria, all too painfully evident figures in Mann’s Munich, where no writer had ever received any such honour. ‘Von’ Aschenbach was displaced wishful thinking (though ‘Thomas von Mann’ would have sounded grotesque). From the perspective of ...”

“... written archives must by now fall open at the right places, marked perhaps by a spent match Peter Black inserted in 1971 or a shrivelled potato chip left behind by Asa Briggs. As for the one or two specific issues Scannell and Cardiff are able to enlarge upon, notably the treatment of unemployment and poverty, they have done so by venturing beyond the ...”

“... and backgrounds of corrupted and corrupt. Between the feudal union boss, Andy Cunningham, the King of Durham, the gifted, charming civil servant George Pottinger, and the compassionate hospital administrator George Braithwaite, there was little in common except a willingness to sell the stewardship of their offices for the backhanders of an unqualified ...”

“... would have agreed. The godly were wont to describe anything they disliked as ‘popery’; but, as Peter Lake has observed, that doesn’t mean they were right. Their use of the label was often inaccurate – a phenomenon that my graduate students at a Catholic university notice with amusement. The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven leaves local and regional ...”

“... Became Shakespeare.2 As such it undeniably knocks Greenblatt’s effort, not to mention Peter Ackroyd’s generalising and overlong Shakespeare: The Biography,3 into a cocked jester’s cap. The ploy of concentrating on the events of a single exciting year neatly leaves out much of what can make the average cradle-to-grave life of Shakespeare seem ...”

“... and concludes nervously: ‘that man inspires by fear.’ Chapter 7, ‘At the Court of the Sun King’, spells it out. The generous, inspiring proprietor who so charmingly persuaded those journalists not to turn against their editor, is transformed by his protégé into Rupert Fear. He is, to start with, ‘much more right-wing than is generally ...”

“... is at constant risk from a bout of amnesia. In his recent book on the office of Prime Minister, Peter Hennessy tells the story of how Whitehall forgot how to declare war.* When officials thought it might be useful to know how to do it, just after the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, they found that the relevant file was missing. It ...”

“... must be offered. There is no point, Williams says, in imagining oneself as ‘Kant at the court of King Arthur’, judging its institutions from a universal standpoint. This is the ‘relativism of distance’ that Williams put forward in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985). It is one of his most controversial claims, and goes together with the thesis ...”