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“... the comparison vivid by observing that the cost of lace on a gown worn in 1613 by the daughter of James I was, at £1700, ‘more valuable than all but a few paintings in the famous collection of his brother, Charles I’. At the same time a certain value, undefinable in economic terms, came to be attached to the ownership of paintings which had no equivalent ...”

“... however, Heaney rather ‘expectedly’ throws his voice through the figure of Sweeney, the Ulster king who’s cursed by Saint Ronan and is transformed into a bird-man. In a note to Station Island Heaney writes: ‘A version of the Irish tale is available in my Sweeney Astray, but I trust these glosses can survive without the support system of the original ...”

“... of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral cortège. Figures from Paul Mellon to Siegfried Kracauer, Robespierre to Claude Simon, whose cavalry unit was massacred in World War Two, put in ...”

“... contribute the double genitives hers and theirs, and shares with Danish the phrasal genitive the king of Spain’s daughter. The nature and the manifestations of case are the subject of the new Oxford Handbook; anyone who wishes to understand the phenomenon of case from any point of view will find something of interest in its 57 chapters (not counting the ...”

“... trials of 1794 the charge against Thelwall and his LCS comrades was that of ‘imagining the King’s death’. ‘Imagining’ was medieval legalese for ‘intending’, but in the political hysteria surrounding the trials even regicidal fantasies, expressed or attributed – the ‘levities of imagination’, as John Thelwall wrote, a touch ...”

“... rest of his mayoralty. Since the 1960s, such shadowy goings-on have provided rich material for ‘James Ellroy and other pulp writers’, as Davis and Wiener sum up LA’s long line of novelist-historians. They themselves take a more sober approach, describing the city’s labyrinthine municipal politics not with relish so much as clarity and distaste.Their ...”

“... European language scholarship on the Macartney saga by John Cranmer-Byng, Alain Peyrefitte, James Hevia, John Watt and others, redirecting our attention to those who did the real work of communicating.The Chinese world order (or ‘tributary system’) that Macartney sought to challenge is mostly imaginary. Empires in China had long used ‘guest ...”

“... she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much it suited the Virginia Company to pretend she was. Nor was her name Pocahontas, which means ‘playful girl’ and like so many other aspects of Indigenous culture had been misunderstood. Yet the name is a ...”

“... servants only two were fit to wait on him; he himself was very ill and very tired. He wrote to the King, saw that his men and invalids were paid and looked after, and then went straight home to San Lucar, which he had never wished to leave. On being offered the command in the first place he had asked to be excused ‘for I know by the small experience I have ...”

“... Later in the book, describing a weekend journey to the countryside to meet his new amanuensis, James Adams, Neil gives a pretty clear idea of how he likes to see himself: ‘James,’ Neil writes, ‘was surprised when somebody his own age emerged one sunny Sunday in shorts and open-necked shirt from a black convertible ...”

“... than rows of ponderous foxhunters, fat with Staffordshire and Devonshire ale, men who drank to the King across the Water and believed all the fundholders were Jews,’ is, Runciman says, to lapse into ‘too much conscious literary merit to be counted even under the most generous rubric’ – and Runciman’s own rubric stretches to history itself – ‘as ...”

“... utopian Philological Society, based at the University of London, the amazing sticktoitiveness of James Murray, editor and mastermind of the project from 1879 to his death in 1915, and the (initially) nervous patron, OUP, who inherited the project 22 year after its launch. Willinsky tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the ...”

“... Revolution broke out, Priestley’s Birmingham laboratory was torn down by patriotic Church and King mobs and eventually he fled to exile in America. Davy’s previous employer, the chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes, had also been confined to the margins of his profession because of his support for the French Revolution. Davy’s address to the Royal ...”

“... a saint that the executioners cut off his head. The litany of holy violence culminates in St James the Dismembered, whose legend could have inspired an episode in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Slain finger by finger and toe by toe, this martyr responds to the loss of each digit with a Bible verse or a prayer. Only when the 27th stroke has severed his ...”

“... Wellcome felt free to start collecting on a grander scale. In his 1994 biography, Robert Rhodes James dismissed Wellcome as a ‘magpie collector’ who tried to rationalise the contents of his hoard after the fact, and concentrated instead on his subject’s social and business interests and his patronage of scientific research. Frances Larson, in ...”