“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were redefined and renamed, the names of the days and the months were changed, while the King of France was first renamed ‘the King of the French’ and finally ‘Citizen Capet’. It was a literary event in another sense, too. Controversialists on every side tried self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch ...”

“... to make their employees conform to their technology rather than the other way around. Insta-Burger King, later to become Burger King, used to have machines which made milkshakes and burgers automatically. Prospective franchisees were told: ‘Both machines have been thoroughly perfected … are of foolproof design – can be ...”

“... own experiments, thought Rattus norvegicus might be suitable.In 1909 Donaldson’s colleague Helen King began to breed rats, selecting offspring for their docility and fertility. After six years, 28 generations and tens of thousands of rats, King had bred what she considered the ‘perfect specimen’: a stable strain ...”

“... across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a ...”

“... Kevin Sharpe’s Personal Rule of Charles I, Conrad Russell’s Fall of the British Monarchies and John Morrill’s Nature of the English Revolution all represent distinct standpoints, but certain common features continue to stand out. Rejecting both constitutional explanations of the Caroline crisis, and class interpretations of the Civil War, these histories ...”

“... There is a touch​ of Shylock in this,’ John Kerrigan says of a moment in King Lear. There are touches of Shylock in many places outside The Merchant of Venice, and indeed outside Shakespeare altogether, but this one is of unusual interest. It is in Cordelia’s speech responding to her father’s question about which of his daughters loves him most – well, to be precise, which of his daughters he is to say loves him most ...”

“... in the British constitution’, celebrated military victories over France and idealised the king as their champion against Catholic enemies. Economically, too, they became more and more closely tied to Britain while leaders of different colonies had more contact with London than with one another. When the First Continental Congress convened in ...”