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“... 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 ...”

“... That, I suppose, is evident enough from Hill’s manner of procedure in such previous volumes as King Log and Mercian Hymns, but it feels particularly the case with his new poem. In an end-note he claims that ‘Péguy, stubborn ran-cours and mishaps and all, is one of the great souls, one of the great prophetic intelligences, of our century,’ and putting ...”

“... of the ecclesiastical courts. Since he urged that these courts be brought under the control of the King in Parliament, More had to tread warily. The great question of the English Reformation, the royal claim to be supreme head of the Church in England, was at issue. He knew what might be in store for him in this world, and he feared what might be his lot in ...”

“... forced into a name change – it was banned by the French government for insulting the corpse of Charles de Gaulle. In a remarkable essay published in the Nouvel Observateur Roussel made two essential points. The first concerned French foreign policy: I don’t much like it when a head of state speaks of the dead as heroes. It usually happens because ...”

“... literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire cloisters for his new castle in California. As one Spanish ...”

“... by serving as a tutor to the children of the prince-bishop of Lübeck, among them the future king of Sweden. He continued his own work, compiling lists of burned books (or books whose authors had been burned), which he intended to publish together under the title ‘Vulcan’s Library’.Research into intellectual auxiliaries has thrived in recent ...”

“... Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.All children, except one, grow up.All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will ...”

“... about the capacity of style to preserve dead subject-matter. Discussing journalism in his essay ‘Charles Whibley’, he writes: ‘literary style is sometimes assigned almost magical properties, or is credited with being a mysterious preservative for subject-matter which no longer interests. This is far from being absolutely true. Style alone cannot ...”

“... was left blank in his journal. ‘A damn’d unhappy part of the World,’ his second-in-command, Charles Clerke, reported, ‘just as destitute as a Country can be.’ To take possession of such a place was a waste of time and energy – ‘an essential loss’, he called it – and to chart it was ‘nothing but a trifling point of geography’. The ...”

“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th century, in ...”