“... not possess more Stewart blood than the Queen.’ By the same appeal all Englishmen should insert King Alfred into their family tree. A further refinement of snobbery offered here is that of antiquity of language. The fact that Scottish Gaelic carries some archaic features is enlarged to give a picture of a static language, possessed of ‘the oldest ...”

“... like to be Albanian – his own mind-set being one of them. He was born in 1936 in the reign of King Zog – the period of The File on H. He is a poet as well as a novelist, and in Albania he is not just big but a national treasure. People know his poetry by heart. In his early days, he celebrated Hoxha, but then he grew more and more critical of the ...”

“... by the picture – which, as Unton put it, ‘did draw more speech and affection’ from the king than all his ‘best arguments and eloquence’.Novel techniques helped to intensify the effect of the portrait miniature. Hilliard used powdered gold to create a background of flames behind a lovestruck young man – the flames would have seemed to flicker ...”

“... for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a ...”

“... combines politics with reflections on the place of education in public life. In one play the King of Navarre is whimsically transformed into a bachelor and rechristened Ferdinand; he retreats from court not for fear of Spanish-funded Catholic plots but to lead a quartet of abstemious students. He experiences a crisis of conscience at breaking an ...”

“... gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there ...”

“... Breton, Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the rest of us feel bamboozled.The​ essays in Seduction and Betrayal were written when ...”

“... its leaders asked Petty and Christopher Wren ‘to consider the philosophy of shipping’, and the king himself urged Petty to turn his mind to naval matters. The mix of science and statecraft was compelling: Petty got down to work straight away. He wrote to the king, saying that ‘there was no greater, no more stately ...”

“... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...”

“... the Labour Party has been the proponent of ‘the Jordanian option’, of a settlement with King Hussein based on a territorial compromise over the West Bank, so as to deal with the Palestinian problem in a way that does not involve either negotiation with the PLO or the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Labour has also regarded, and ...”

“... in part, and it is satisfactorily gruesome: ‘What a bed! An immense slab, nine by nine, a double king size, it has a mortuary headboard of black quilted Naugahide, with a built-in plastic back angle and retractable armrests of speckled metal.’ Because Elvis ‘detests everything antique with the heartfelt disgust of a real forward-looking American of his ...”

“... whose centre is Bourges, and are the writing thanks to which, pace Proust, Baudelaire, Henry James (who described her work as being like ‘a large, polished, gilded Easter egg, the pride of a sweet shop if not the treasure of a museum’) and other townees who couldn’t be doing with her, Sand maintains to this day a pastoral niche in the ...”

“... of the most brutal of African travellers, condemned by historians for his part in the creation of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji in November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ...”

“... At a mass demonstration for Ethiopia in Trafalgar Square a few months later, C.L.R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey and Jomo Kenyatta approached the colonialism question more subtly. ‘You have talked of the “White Man’s Burden”,’ Ashwood Garvey observed. ‘Now we are carrying yours and standing between you and fascism.’During the Arab ...”

“... there exhausted, his shirt drenched in sweat after delivering his interpretation of Don Quixote, King Lear or the Book of Job. His last poetic thoughts are of disgrace at the podium, of disciplinary action taken against him and of how, if he’s dead, he can’t be fired:but here’s the terror of tomorrow’s lecturesbad in themselves, the students dropping ...”