“... of hesitation or doubt. His examples include Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf, Hildebrand, Samson and David. A hero of this type ‘so perfectly embodies the values of his culture that he experiences no doubts’: Achilles, for instance, is said to be motivated entirely by ‘archaic blood vengeance’. Yet the Iliad could be said to fit Ziolkowski’s model ...”

“... I always thought that killer fellatio was the talent which deprived the nation of its rightful King). The book is clogged with facts and suppositions taken from here, there and everywhere, and applied to humans. Anything any vagina from any species is able to do or was once capable of doing is adduced as evidence of what Blackledge calls ‘the intelligent ...”

“... story’s odder aspects is the meter reader’s own anachronistic hero fantasy: ‘In Bible days a king might ride through a field and go: That one. And she would be brought unto him. And they would duly be betrothed and if she gave birth unto a son, super, bring out the streamers, she was a keeper … What mattered was offspring and the furtherance of the ...”

“... with Britain, formed on a visit of nine months in the retinue of the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia in 1814 – enough for him to declare that the stuffed giraffes in the British Museum, which he visited soon after reaching London on his second visit, were apt symbols of British taste. His generalisations about the English are more negative than ...”

“... subscribing to le dernier cri from Europe’. Rothko dominates an essay in the Hopper catalogue by David Anfam, the author of the Rothko catalogue raisonné, who notes that ‘so much has been written about Edward Hopper that perhaps one of the few remaining royal roads by which to approach him is via another massively interpreted artist.’ Anfam makes the ...”

“... primarily functions through the operation of conventions, which regulate such matters as whom the king chooses to be prime minister and the accountability of ministers to Parliament. The relationship between Parliament and the courts is similarly governed by conventional principles of comity and restraint. In R (Wheeler) v. Office of the Prime Minister in ...”

“... rhetorical style is modelled on the Rat Pack’s favourite comedian, another Don – Rickles, the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little Marco Rubio’, ‘Low Energy Jeb Bush’, ‘Birdbrain Nikki Haley’ doomed them in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets ...”

“... accusation of academic complacency. ‘Lightning, Phoenix, Arizona’ has the abrupt menace of a David Lynch dream sequence, the cardiac arrest when a previously straightforward narrative crosses the line and touches a vertiginous post-mortem truth. We need to be reminded of the ugly, petrol-breathed, epidermic floss sulking past our own windows. These ...”

“... Without Kennedy’s stewardship of daring there would have been no Bay of Pigs, no Martin Luther King wiretaps, no covert special action groups, no nuclear showdown at the OK Corral: but there also would have been no Test Ban Treaty, no war on Jimmy Hoffa, no Civil Rights Act, no Alliance for Progress, no Manpower Development and Training Act, no rising hope ...”

“... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...”

“... a single non-royal person was common, even commoner than either genuinely personal monarchy, the king his own minister, or conciliar, collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who ...”

“... Isaac Casaubon, Mayerne sought, and received, sanctuary at the court of the British philosopher-king James VI and I, where erudition was prized over orthodoxy – or indeed decorum. England was to be Mayerne’s de facto home for the rest of his life. The wars of religion had injected a crucial element of paranoia into court life. Kings and leading ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... of Surrealism during the war years (he also launched a journal there, with Duchamp, Ernst and David Hare, called VVV). And though Bretonian Surrealism was opposed to abstraction, it helped American artists like Jackson Pollock develop an automatist gesturalism that was more expressive of the unconscious than any Surrealist dreamscape. Such was also its ...”

“... Victoria Nuland upheld the ban. Yet by September 2014 he was being shown round the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington DC by Barack Obama, and in June 2016 he addressed a joint session of Congress on the subject of his and America’s shared ‘philosophy of freedom’.Rupert Murdoch anointed Modi as India’s ‘best leader with the best policies ...”