“... 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 ...”

“... avowal’ in the name of the ‘members of the Hungarian nation’: ‘We are proud that our King St Stephen a thousand years ago placed the Hungarian state on stable foundations, and made our fatherland a part of Christian Europe … We recognise the role of Christianity in conserving the nation.’ The grandiloquent constitutional flourishes were ...”

“... The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1955-58, an account of years spent with Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and E.M. Forster on the east coast.) ‘I see by a handbill in the grocer’s shop that a man is going to lecture on the Gorilla in a few weeks,’ said Edward FitzGerald, who lived near Woodbridge. ‘So there is something to look forward ...”

“... came closer than any previous demoniac to political power and the forces vying for it: the king, the diplomats of the Church, the aristocracy, the demagogues and the crowd. Fear of contagious mass enthusiasm meant that her time in Paris was spent in increasingly restricted spaces – private chapels and prison cells – where prelates and doctors ...”

“... The frontispiece of Olive Schreiner’s novella about the Matabeleland campaign, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), carried a photograph of three Black men hanging from a tree, with white men in hats arrayed in a semicircle around the bodies. The dead men are naked. Some of the living men are dressed in what look like cricket whites. One has ...”

“... to execution when his father reneged, peacefully playing what I would call ‘bulliers’ with King Stephen, who hadn’t got the heart even to frighten him. Clearly childhood status was often recognised and appreciated. It there was a difference between Medieval and modern conditions, one might expect it to come from the notion of the ‘higher love’ of ...”

“... the history of art as the history of more than art alone. Wilton’s essay on painting, taken with Peter Funnell’s on the London art world, Clive Wainwright’s on patronage and the applied arts and Simon Jervis’s on Rudolph Ackermann, build between them a picture of a period in which the whole idea of culture was being formed. The word itself was first ...”

“... noticeable that the ANC’s chief spokesmen on the mass action, Kasrils and the ANC Youth leader, Peter Mokoba, not only represent the movement’s most radical, adventurist wing but are both 2nd XI players. Indeed, if this was supposed to be the great trial of strength with the Government which the Hard Left has been thirsting for, it is difficult to see how ...”

“... end it was only the close alliance of two non-Tories, Attlee and Hitler, who made a PM of WSC; the King, as well as most Tories, wanted Halifax, who indeed would have been PM in 1940 had he wanted the job – as Lord Blake trenchantly reaffirms in his contribution (‘How Churchill became prime minister’). There but for the grace of Lord Halifax, Churchill ...”

“... that anyone could refer to.’ This has been a great and perhaps painful discovery for him. Peter Strawson spoke for the opposite style of thinking when he wrote over thirty years ago in Individuals that ‘the idea of an “exhaustive description” is in fact quite meaningless in general, although sense may be given to it in a particular context of ...”