“... revolutions, is to reassure yourself that it isn’t feasible. Otherness turns out to be bogus: John Kirkby’s The Capacity and Extent of the Human Understanding (1745) presents us with a noble savage on his paradisal island who has figured out more or less the whole of English 18th-century religion almost down to country parsonages, simply by attentively ...”

“... 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 are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is ...”

“... he had retired, an unexpected reserve of ladies was discovered, ‘and with great good nature the King ... came back into the Presence Chamber, and went through the ceremony of kissing 300 ladies more’. There would be room for a book that really examined the period’s inventive gossip, how it circulated and what effect it had, but this is only ...”

“... the idea of a Yugoslav identity. The use of the name ‘Yugoslav’ had been encouraged by King Alexander when he established his dictatorship in 1929, but it immediately became a cover for what remained a greater Serbia, thus acquiring a bad odour. Tito avoided it, promoting instead the concepts of brotherhood and unity among the different ...”

“... since he throws up so many masking pseudonyms for Wakefield, it is usually given the same name – King Edward’s. Typically, having been crammed for the ‘scholarship’ and pushed into the school by his miner father, the Storey hero loses his way. He is bolshy, good at the wrong sports (despises Rugby Union – gentleman’s football), truants, makes ...”

“... being a Dominion meant being neglected financially, not sustained. In which climate, to be for King and Empire, as if nothing had changed, meant taking sides whether you liked it or not. Bradman didn’t like it, going out of his way to say he had no politics. This seems to have worked, inasmuch as no one knew what, in any party sense, his politics ...”

“... texts written by men who lived in the time of Alexander or knew someone who had. Soon after the King’s death, little tracts appeared. In ‘The Last Days of Alexander and Hephaestion’, Ephippus described the drunken excesses of Alexander and his ‘best friend’ on their return from India, how Alexander liked to dress up as a god, wearing the ram’s ...”

“... No one in Washington could match him at it, not even, in the days before he became President, John F. Kennedy. He was handsome and slim and when he smiled, at first shy and then bold, everything stopped. He was the Sun King. Less the Sun King, given Halberstam’s subsequent ...”

“... 19th century – a good boy doesn’t throw his footman out of the window. The book is in the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera at the Bodleian, and this scene was pictured, as I recall, taking place in a panelled room – a prefects’ study, perhaps, or a dining club. Boys’ play, then. And although circumstances and contexts change, still ...”

“... do their best to disavow. At the end of What a Carve Up! (1994) Coe acknowledges the work of Frank King, and writes: ‘the only repayment I can offer him is to recommend that readers make every effort to seek out these and other novels … and campaign vigorously for their reissue.’ In The Rotters’ Club he goes even further and lists the dozen or so books ...”

“... four white police officers were acquitted of using excessive force in the act of arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins ...”

“... Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a London-Edinburgh publishing enterprise that put Scotland on the literary map. For ...”

“... of papers sold to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. And now, here’s The Pale King, this book-shaped version of the ‘long thing’, assembled by Michael Pietsch, Wallace’s editor on Infinite Jest, from ‘a neat stack of manuscript, 12 chapters totalling nearly 250 pages’ discovered by Wallace’s agent on the desk in his home ...”

“... works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a small event in a small corner of the metropolis; a drop in ...”

“... And what will the succession be?People tell you in Grimsby there was only one power: that fish was king, and that it didn’t abdicate, it was overthrown by foreigners. Once, the world’s largest ice factory would turn out gargantuan ice blocks to be crushed by the ton, carried on conveyors to the dockside and poured from chutes into the holds of the ...”