“... to that poem’s all-male cast. ‘The Journey’ and the book’s final poem, ‘The Glass King’, in which the mad Charles VI of France and his wife Isabella of Bavaria become emblems of Boland’s sense of the place of lyric poetry in domestic life, are complex, self-reflexive and sharply affecting; they indicate ...”

“... incidental detail; the story itself is simple enough. It tells how Freddie Montgomery (Frederick Charles St John Vanderveld Montgomery, if you please), stout, blond, of some intellect and no substance, king of the expatriate castle on a Mediterranean island, carelessly finds himself owing money to one Señor Aguirre, a ...”

“... in the Fifties when Stan Cullis’s Wolverhampton Wanderers adopted the ideas of a Wing-Commander Charles Reep. Reep had invented a theory called POMO, or Point of Maximum Opportunity, which involved getting the ball to the aforesaid point as soon as possible: the long-ball game, in short. He worked out a formula which would guarantee a team promotion: S ...”

“... Next Millennium, much the more substantial of the books, contains the text of five out of the six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures which Calvino was to have delivered at Harvard. It was published in Italy in 1988, but for some reason the translation has taken a while to reach us. Calvino’s headings are ...”

“... seemed to her sensible and amiable lawyer father, or to a family friend, the rising young diplomat Charles Ritchie, who was to meet Elizabeth Bowen in London in the war and become the great love of her life. Our Elizabeth’s father was one of those people who, as his friends said, ‘always gave a lot more than he got’, and in an odd sense his daughter ...”

“... a volume written as an exercise in academic sociology. This was Art Students Observed (1973), by Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, part of Faber’s Society Today and Tomorrow series. The authors’ research was funded by the Social Science Research Council. One suspects that Madge took the leading role in the book, not only because of seniority but ...”

“... MPs at the Carlton Club. But the long-run explanation ran deeper. Like the monarchy in the days of Charles I, the regime foundered because the Court lost touch with the Country. The mechanics of this process are beautifully displayed, the big wheels turning with the small towards the climax. This is indeed political history in its most ambitious and developed ...”

“... 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 pace, it ...”

“... in all ages and places,’ he writes to Emerson – a ‘book written by a wild man’, ‘looking king and beggar in the face with an indifference of brotherhood,’ he tells his brother. There has not been in ‘a hundred years any book that came more direct and flamingly sincere from the heart of man’. After it is all over, and after another long stretch ...”

“... didn’t see the real Los Angeles until 1965. But to him the city was a myth as powerful as King Arthur. ‘I rented a car at the airport and drove down the length of Sunset in time to see the sun sink into the Pacific … I spent my time driving aimlessly around the freeways. It was concrete over sand. The anguish of lost souls … The people had lost ...”

“... author Scott-Baumann deals with is Aphra Behn (1640-89). Behn had a short career as a spy for Charles II, was probably imprisoned and was among the first women to make a living from her writing. Behn represents ‘a very important corner on the road’, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own. With Behn, ‘we leave behind, shut up in their parks ...”

“... themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding proprietors, generally have a better nose for ...”

“... in 1591. He spots that it includes a presentation to the Queen by ‘Auberon (Oberon) the fairie King’, and duly writes to Malone to tell him all about it. ‘I leave the inferences, if any, to you.’ Sure enough, the content of Warton’s letter turns up (unacknowledged) in Malone’s essay on the chronology of Shakespeare’s plays in his hugely ...”

“... she has even appropriated the Royal insignia for her notepaper. However, Thatcher was like King Midas in reverse. Everything she touched was magically transformed into lead: a metered liberty, the lowest common denominator of coinage. For the golden refulgence of Monarchy this was fatal. Something which ceases being priceless can only appear absurdly ...”

“... the Catholic faith. All seats were sold countrywide. The Cautionary Tales – which tell of Henry King, ‘Who chewed bits of String and was early cut off in Dreadful Agonies’, and Rebecca, ‘Who slammed Doors for Fun and Perished Miserably’ – are in iambic octosyllabic couplets and can run to fifty lines or so. How did Clara Butt contrive to sing ...”