“... parties (one composed, paradoxically, of ‘independents’), both swearing allegiance to King Hassan, and a tiny socialist party on the fringe of political life. Elsewhere in Africa you will find, without searching too hard, countries in which national liberation continues – long after it has been achieved – to provide the chief focus for ...”

“... to its own fictiveness, and revealing itself as the deceitful handiwork of fabulists like the mad King Boris, who is heard stamping about overhead in one of Robbe-Grillet’s own earliest fictions. As the author of novels that wouldn’t dream of pretending to be other than fictional, Echenoz is heir to that progressive line of thought, even if, diffident ...”

“... would have been drawn to this nondescript patch of water by legends concerned with a divine king or a god. Here there is nothing, no legends, no history, no creative essences in the water that can cure sickness of body and mind. In India the pond would have been ringed by hucksters, half-naked holy men smeared with ashes, epileptics, sellers of fake ...”

“... To a modern reader, this sounds like a cop-out, rather like Nahum Tate’s attempt to rewrite King Lear with a happy ending. Some of the ancient audience may have felt the same, though most might simply have savoured the irony, since they knew all along what the fate of Gilgamesh would be. Others might have reflected that it was better to be judged in the ...”

“... form of prayer, invented in early medieval monasteries and much cultivated by the laity, like King Richard III, in the 15th century. Forman’s practice of this old-fashioned kind of prayer is the best guide we have to the kind of Christian he was. Not, by the exacting standards of the seminary priests of his time, any kind of Catholic, or he wouldn’t ...”

“... in Plymouth and travelled to London. With her came her husband, the English tobacco planter John Rolfe, and several members of her Native American family. Done up in embroidered silks and Flemish lace, she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much ...”

“... to Joe Allen’s, on the corner of Burleigh Street and the Strand, for birthday suppers. In 886 King Alfred reoccupied Lundenwic and rechristened it Lundenburh. The Strand is recorded in charters as the Akemannestrete – the road to Bath – and took a sharp right at a hamlet called Cierring (Charing Cross), went up what is now the Haymarket and carried on ...”

“... personal danger, and even when times were good his reforming zeal was always constrained by the King’s theological conservatism. With Henry’s death, the close shaves were apparently over and Cranmer could at last begin to build a truly reformed Church under the new Josiah, Edward VI, with the aim, as MacCulloch repeatedly documents, of making England ...”

“... the 1960s on the last page of Campbell’s hard-eyed reconstruction of the legend, ‘and I am King of the Universe.’ When we met in England, Ginsberg had abdicated another impromptu throne, as King of the May (Kral Majales) in Prague. He had been expelled for taking off his clothes during a reading to his student ...”

“... he opted for schemes that make us shudder today.’ At the same time as Coren’s assault, John Carey in The Intellectuals and the Masses branded Wells an inveterate despiser of the common man. All in all, 1992 was a bad year for the Wellsian cause. Coren’s book was dealt with in this paper by Patrick Parrinder (8 April 1993). Parenthetically ...”

“... the Victorian city. But not everything had moved on since the 16th-century martyrologist John Foxe described the only lights on London Bridge and some of the capital’s streets as coming from the candles of costermongers trading along the way. For a long time, even as London changed, hawkers traversed the city and fed its residents in ways that kept ...”

“... formidable ally with ample weapons stocks, which nursed a long-standing animosity, reciprocated by King Hassan II and his government, towards the largely pro-Western monarchy on its western border. East Timor and Western Sahara are post-colonial narratives in the proper sense; and how badly they read. General Franco’s death followed within a year and a half ...”

“... security services are on the look out for terrorists, not journalists. All the same, ‘furious’ John Reid, the defence secretary, has ordered an investigation. Let’s assume for a moment that the male line of the monarchy is under threat. How to safeguard it? Perhaps a royal sperm bank is in order. There used to be one for the seed of Nobel Prize ...”

“... infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hour With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. The novel at a crucial point reaches the same mood as well as the identical locale; and Stetson’s corpses ‘planted last year in your garden’ are ...”

“... thread-makers and embroiderers Christiana of Enfield, Catherine of Lincoln, Maud of Canterbury, John Machon, Alyse Darcy, Alice Catour and Thomas Bell could be added those of Alexius and Andronicus Effomatus, Greek ‘workers of damask gold’ (drawn gold wire) in London; John of Cologne, a German immigrant working for ...”