“... From Rabat he writes of the ceremony that accompanied the Sultan of Morocco’s reception of King Feisal of Iraq: ‘though not (as you know) much in favour of Kings and Queens in general’, he mingles with the crowd, which was, ‘of course, a good deal more interesting than the royal procession’. One of the best passages describes Hodgkin’s epic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... In​ 1676, during the period of colonial conflict known as King Philip’s War, Reverend Hope Atherton was the chaplain accompanying Captain William Turner’s militia on their march to an Algonquian encampment near Deerfield, Massachusetts in the Connecticut River Valley. There they ambushed the sleeping tribe, slaughtered some of them and drove others into the river, which swept them over the waterfall – now known as Turners Falls – to their deaths ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as a goldsmith in Lübeck, and was polished in Italy on a Grand Tour subsidised by the Danish king. He liked to turn his hand to all kinds of art: portraits, maps, prospects, engineering charts, medals, triumphal arches, emblems, calligraphy, heraldry, bestiaries, religious caricature and propaganda. In demand all over Europe, patronised by kings and ...”

“... house when Quintana was little, but to note the things he failed to mention – ‘for example the king snakes that dropped from the rafters of the garage into the open Corvette I parked below’. Locals thought a king snake in the Corvette was a good thing – it meant no rattlesnakes! Didion didn’t trust that; she looked ...”

“... draws inspiration from 18th-century and Romantic writers: a verse recipe in the manner of William King, 21 ‘Vignettes’ based on engravings by Thomas Bewick, and some distinctly Wordsworthian landscape poems feature in his collection. But where Clampitt hops about dottily – despite the decorous appearance of her stanzas – snatching at bits of Keats and ...”

“... Chronicles, weren’t seen to count as historical: the play originally printed as The History of King Lear had to be reclassified as a tragedy (just as the erstwhile tragedies of Richard II and Richard III became histories), and was joined by Cymbeline, despite that play’s competing affinities with history and with comedy. Other potential anomalies ...”

“... stood out even there. The other soldiers found him hilarious: they would whistle ‘God Save the King’ in the middle of the night for the pleasure of seeing him jump out of bed and stand to attention. He caught rheumatic fever from wearing damp fatigues, an illness which, according to Kenny, stunted his growth. Having been thrown out of the Royal ...”