“... even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do credit to any television ...”

“... end of the town without consulting him. She never comes back. It is shrugged off very casually: King John (somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: ‘If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?’ I used to recite it (in my day children were called on to torture visitors in this way), but while I enjoyed the rhythm and the ...”

“... illimitable and uncontrollable as the monarch once was. It cannot be relied upon – any more than King John – to be an adequate guardian of the citizens’ rights and interests. Whatever the force of these arguments, it still seems slightly unsettling to find a broad group of the Left backing proportional representation and a written Bill of ...”

“... We think now of Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone, but the pattern can be traced back to King John, when London sneaked its own municipal charter under the lee of the barons, and even before. From almost the start, the dominance of Roman London in the affairs of Britain was a surprise, and shakily defined. But the climax came in the 17th ...”

“... theory to promote the cause of Parliament against the Crown and to legitimise the execution of King Charles I in 1649. Hobbes’s counter-revolutionary challenge eventually won the day. To cite Berlin’s own litany, we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart ...”

“... undiscovered Southern continent – really existed; if it did, to take possession in the name of King George III; and if it didn’t, to plant the flag on whatever still unknown lands were encountered in the circumnavigation.The Royal Society would organise the astronomy, securing a grant from the king to pay for it; the ...”

“... have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a thousand pages. A great virtue of John Keegan’s is its brevity. Here is the saga in miniature. Keegan’s Churchill is pre-eminently a man of war and a man of words. The Army made him physically, intellectually and morally – Sandhurst and the years in India and Africa ‘must be counted among ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... his jowly visage as a pear, poire having the double meaning in French of ‘idiot’. The Citizen King sued and the resulting trial and associated publicity provoked a proliferation of pear imagery on a scale of which Philipon could only have dreamed. The Prince Regent was more pragmatic. One of the most caricatured figures in the golden age of caricature, he ...”

“... the Crucifixion has been engraved, with Christ at the centre, his arms outstretched, and Mary and John the Evangelist below. When turned over and viewed through the thickness of the egg-shaped cabochon, the scene of Christ’s painful sacrifice is magnified. Depending on the light source and your viewpoint, his body contorts this way and that, and Mary and ...”

“... with which she must have come to disagree as the work went on. She confuses the king’s Chamber with his Privy Chamber, a point of importance in the tracking of so many careers to which she devotes such labours. Henry VII’s mythical treasure reappears; Anne Boleyn is called Marquise of Pembroke when, in fact, and most significantly, she ...”

“... Fiction’, ‘who was in the slot-machine racket, decided to go straight and became a laundromat king, sent his daughter to Bennington, where she married a poet-in-residence or a professor of modern linguistic philosophy ... People speak of the lack of tradition or of manners as having a bad effect on the American novel, but the self-made man is a far richer ...”

“... disposition of his breast’, in reply to a defence against More’s retort to an earlier tract by John Frith. Frith was only a late intervener in a battle that had been joined since 1528, in which year More, chartered by his old friend Cuthbert Tunstal, who was also his bishop, had begun to read and to refute the ‘pestilent books’ of Luther’s English ...”

“... it, as Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, and the arrival in 1605 of a man with a mission: John White, known to posterity as the ‘patriarch of Dorchester’. All Christians should live according to Christ’s teachings, lay up treasure in Heaven and follow God rather than man. Evidence of their doing so is less than universal. Yet sometimes we find ...”

“... Long ago, with his first collection, In a Green Night (1962), he stated his aims in the poem ‘As John to Patmos’, and again in ‘Islands’: O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did: To praise lovelong, the living and the brown ...”