“... cobra-strikes all the more lethal. The precocious brilliance of his first book, He That Plays the King, written when he was 23 and tapped for glory with a foreword by Orson Welles. His triumphant stint as theatre columnist for the Observer. His championing of Look Back in Anger, the play that blew the tea cosies off the English stage and became the rude ...”

“... about 2300 BC, features a nobleman defending himself thus: I dug a lake, and I planted trees. The king praised me. My father made a will for me, for I was excellent – a man beloved of his father, praised of his mother, whom all his brothers loved. I gave bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, I ferried him who had no boat. The punishment of the wicked ...”

“... Show, Married with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the ...”

“... could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of The Good Fight (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again’. ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused ...”

“... humanation of a god’. But St Matthew makes it clear that the Magi had come to see the new-born King of the Jews. They had no reason to doubt that the baby was human, so if the old Magus was really doing what Steinberg supposes, it could only be to satisfy himself that the child was not a girl. In his discussion of such paintings Professor Steinberg makes ...”

“... his name to the proclamation by which he sought to induce Napoleon’s soldiers to desert to the king. Though seized with military fervour, d’Arblay spent the war safely at Trèves. It was Fanny who was in Brussels during the Waterloo campaign. Her letters have become a prime historical source for the tension beforehand (‘How awful is this ...”

“... they, too, become a relic. It may, though, still be possible to buy the Führer’s portrait of King Farouk, school of Kujau. And all those German historians kept so jealously away from despoiling the treasures with their sour disillusion, and who so darkly hinted that it was all a vast and complicated plot by the KGB or the CIA, may console themselves by ...”

“... separated, at birth, who goes on to discover that he is his own non-existent, royal twin (Oedipus, King Arthur, Krishna). Wright regards ‘mythologising’ as little more than ‘lying’: separated twins who overdramatise their resemblances, or make up stories in order to get into the press, are ‘mythologising’, a charge supported by the likelihood that ...”

“... weren’t interested in ‘causes’. But Hecht has found his cause. His introduction came via Peter Bergson, the nom de guerre of Hillel Kook, who had come to America from Lithuania by way of Palestine. After Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, Kook formed a series of organisations to continue his work, including the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and ...”

“... and ‘romps’). Earlier novels such as Closely Observed Trains and I Served the King of England, first appearing in the late 1960s, are no longer central to his achievement. Cutting It Short isn’t the David Lodge novel that its English title seems to promise; indeed, one of the things that is to be docked – twice, and excruciatingly ...”

“... child self reading ‘The Tree of Justice’ in Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which never quite fell, the chokey ...”

“... and from above, the yard is one of those places where the city’s built environment seems to peter out and go to seed; though crossed by fences and framed by the sides of buildings, it seems indifferent to any formal order. Fried speaks of a ‘sense of makeshiftness, of an entire environment having been put together, constructed, not in a spirit of ...”

“... like the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn that flowered on Christmas Day. The Puritan preacher Hugh Peter wanted to pull down Stonehenge, and the 18th-century Baptist Thomas Robinson boasted that he had ‘killed’ 40 stones at Avebury with his own hands. But, like the radicals who proposed that all churches and cathedrals should be razed to the ground, they ...”

“... of the Enlightenment dominated historical writing as late as the 1960s, and is best represented by Peter Gay’s two magisterial volumes published in 1966 and 1969. After Gay and Cassirer, two trends dominated Enlightenment history until Israel came on the scene. One situated the Enlightenment in a particular national context, giving little attention to the ...”

“... about whether he’d have to walk backwards down the steps after receiving his prize from the King of Sweden (about which he was seriously nervous); he traded bonhomous badinage with girlfriends from the distant past; he cheerfully sent the photographs and supplied the autographs; he commended the amateur physicists for their bold ...”