“... He later boasted of his obstinate silence: his ‘judges’ – who included rackmaster Richard Topcliffe – ‘could get nothing of him to all their demands but Aye and No’. He was also plagued by prison informers, ‘two damn’d villains’ who tried to wheedle seditious sentiments out of him. One of these was Robert Poley, the government ...”

“... local dominance by various ruses, some of them old-fashioned daredevil exploits devised by Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. ‘When full deduction is made of the advantageous conditions’ of Allenby’s victory at Megiddo, Liddell Hart concluded, ‘the operations deserve to rank among history’s masterpieces for their breadth of vision and ...”

“... having examined the child, claimed to have detected promise of mathematical genius. Moving on to King Edward VI Grammar School in Aston, Reed specialised in Classics. Since Greek was not taught, he taught himself, and went on to win the Temperley Latin prize and a scholarship to Birmingham University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his ...”

“... and beautiful, quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might ...”

“... travellers to Mecca as Ludovico de Varthema, Domingo Badia y Leblich, John Lewis Burckhardt and Richard Burton. While most Western reports pretended to be objective, in some cases this was a pretence only, and Peters would have been better advised to have treated Varthema’s 16th-century Itinerario as a novel about oriental travel, rather than as a ...”

“... and Metamorphosis – Charles Martindale, who protested at Tom Paulin’s review in the LRB, and Richard Swigg who many months ago answered Alistair Elliott’s more brutal review in the TLS – have every reason to wonder that Tomlinson should still solicit the suffrages of a public that shows him such ill-will. He must be, so it must seem, either ...”

“... Perhaps arrogantly, we suspect that people did not feel the need for a statue of Cobden or Richard Coeur de Lion, but felt that they (and, above all, that others) should feel the need. It is noteworthy that despite the concern with commemorating worthies such as King Arthur and Francis Drake in 18th-century England ...”

“... there. Then they go to a dinner party with someone who might have been in the company of Dr King when he was assassinated in the Memphis motel. Rose enters history reluctantly, you might say squeamishly, attesting all the while to her own small concerns, displaying that weird combination of the sinister and the childlike that often typifies the ...”

“... Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there is very well respected, even revered.’ For years, Arab rulers told their Western patrons not to worry about their subjects, as though ...”

“... were brothers, well-connected enough to buy pardons from the Crown, or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The rector, Richard de Folville, was eventually dragged from his church by armed men and beheaded on the spot. ‘The records reveal so many thugs in holy orders,’ Spraggs ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the ...”

“... hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from Eleusis, and now Alexander’s manageably-sized study of the whole corpus of the poetry, and Woodward’s of The Pisan Cantos. My feeling is that Pound’s stock is rising, and that one reason for ...”

“... by rendering a complex story comprehensible. Ludendorff, Von Kluck, Joffre, Sir John French, King Albert of Belgium – all come, in Tuchman’s portrayal, to embody the characteristics of the nations to which they belong. We feel that we are seeing a modern morality play re-enacted before our eyes. History takes on a meaning that most contemporary ...”

“... and those – here, primarily theatre practitioners such as Peter Sellars, Anchuli Felicia King and Keith Hamilton Cobb – who still find enabling possibilities in their performance. (Sellars has a fascinating exchange with Ayanna Thompson in which they discuss the paradoxical advantages enjoyed by performances of Shakespeare’s plays in prisons over ...”

“... with Chamberlain, Beatrice Webb and Milner) conspire with the Duc de Mersch (King Leopold of the Belgians) to ‘civilise’ Greenland’s Eskimos. The protagonist of the novel, Arthur Granger, is an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist who betrays his own cherished chivalric ideals for the sake of a girl-agent from the Fourth ...”