“... Fear of witches that manifested itself so widely. Grave theologians and stern lawyers, the learned King James I and the even more learned lawyer Jean Bodin raised on fragile pilings of fact a towering structure of Monty-Pythonish inferences. Europeans who knew that every village had always had its cunning man or woman who found lost objects and charmed ...”

“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain ...”

“... in 1603, Hilliard remained famous and busy, but he was never quite at home in the Jacobean age. King James renewed his patent as the royal limner, and sat for him, but his Danish consort, Queen Anne, a more proactive patron, favoured Oliver; her passion for masques brought a new line of fantastically costumed court ladies into his repertoire. Oliver ...”

“... to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the Constitutional Court. Orbán called ...”

“... Jim has got it, but would they flip burgers eight hours a day?’ She used to work for Burger King. ‘We don’t get much diversity round here,’ she said, ‘95 per cent of the children are white and of that probably 60 per cent are blonde.’ ‘Back in the 1980s,’ Harris mused, ‘there was one black person in Fakenham and everybody knew ...”

“... the English faculty’s lecture list for Trinity term 1996, I find that the Professor of Poetry, James Fenton, will give a lecture on 9 May entitled Eliot v. Julius. It would be improper of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this ...”

“... what looks like a Post-It note to a friend, or versified notes on a Jackson Pollock painting, a James Dean movie or ‘the music of Adolphe Deutsch’. You may also get one of many enticing, informal, secretly-complex poems that sound like nobody else ever has: How can you start hating me when I’m so comfortable in your raincoat the apples kept bumping ...”

“... won a new status for authorship, to befit the moral and educative role he claimed for it. Under James I the former bricklayer and soldier and brawler and convict, the one-time mediocre actor and hack adapter of other people’s plays, became the royal laureate, the friend of courtiers, diplomats and MPs, the honorand of universities. He was Britain’s ...”

“... proprietors to give laws to both oceans.’ Paterson, accompanied by his evasive little sidekick James Smyth, had been trolling around Europe with a Darien plan long before he sold it to his fellow Scots. In Amsterdam coffee houses, he had tried to enthuse Dutch bankers with ‘a Common Wealth and free port in the Emperour of Dariens Countrey’. In ...”

“... allowed the boy to be registered as Edmund Lewes – perhaps with a wry glance at the bastard in King Lear. But the offence was repeated; and before Agnes bore the second of her four or five children by Hunt, Lewes had ceased to regard her as his wife. Yet, having condoned her adultery, he was precluded from ever asking for a divorce. In this ...”

“... Duke of Gloucester, who represented George V at the coronation) had bowed before the Black king. ‘We of the black race are now free.’ Haile Selassie was, he said, the Black Messiah. Events unfolded from this point in a way that becomes familiar as Subin’s book goes on.Howell was imprisoned by the colonial authorities and while detained wrote The ...”

“... hinged double set, trying to throw the baby Jesus across the intervening frame at the kneeling king on the left? And why was I supposed to care about the mustard-coloured pot on the mustard-coloured table with the mustard-coloured dead sunflowers in it? Pictures were another matter. You could imagine living with pictures; my parents’ house had pictures ...”

“... The pub has become as much a restaurant as it is a place to have a drink. It is owned by Greene King, the brewing company, and run by a Polish woman who lives upstairs. It is full most evenings: customers smoking cigarettes stand on the pavement. One of the barmen is from Stettin – ‘Paris of the Baltic’, as he likes to say – and studied politics at ...”

“... Charlotte, meanwhile, is dressed in white silk and lace. She is dressed for dinner with the king, but has paused at her toilette to attend to her children, while a maid hovers in the next room.Zoffany’s portrait is a conversation piece (if toddlers can be said to make conversation), which purports to depict a private and natural familial scene, albeit ...”

“... Persian, Koman, Chaldean and other ‘schismatic languages’ in order to aid conversion. In 1276 James II of Aragon agreed to found a monastery at Miramar in Majorca for the study of Eastern languages, and Llull himself travelled to Tunis, Cyprus, Armenia and Libya. At the Council of Vienne in 1311, the Catholic Church decided to set up chairs in ...”