“... The great heroes of chivalric mythology were revealed through their swords; Roland had Durendaal, Arthur had Excalibur, and in the heat of a duel Lancelot recognised a fellow knight of the Round Table by his sword. When Perceval was dubbed knight, he kissed his weapon. Sword responded to sword; swords were symbols. When Edward I’s judges asked Earl Warenne ...”

“... that is, the police – are fended off with no trouble at all.) The way in which the honest little shopkeeper gets caught up in the Hung triad’s web and is eventually killed (has his ‘face washed’) is not the most original feature of Mo’s novel. What is fresh and consistently comic is the quaint way in which familiar British situations are ...”

“... easily’ Britain’s greatest commander of the war. It is a pity that Sir David has not allowed a little more space to discuss disputes among the Chiefs of Staff, in particular to expand his passing reference to Brooke’s reservations about strategic bombing and the excessive influence over Churchill enjoyed by ‘Bomber’ Harris. Brooke’s love-hate ...”

“... churchyards. Books of popular homiletics such as George Gifford’s Country Divinity (1581), Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601) and Lewis Bayley’s The Practice of Piety (1611) aimed to set forth the rudiments of soul-saving doctrine in plain English. Their authors were Puritan ministers, who drew on their own experience in ...”

“... about successful or extraordinary younger sons: about the Duke of Wellington, for instance, who as Arthur Wellesley – the third surviving son of an Anglo-Irish earl – took an ensign commission in the army because it wasn’t clear what else he’d be good at (he was ‘food for powder and nothing more’, his mother said). Rory Muir’s interest is in the ...”

“... pentathlete Mary Peters; from subsidiary groupings such as Actors for Europe, which included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to Tom Stoppard. Ogres such as Benn, Paisley and Powell were no match for these recruits. The 1975 referendum has attracted the attention of various political ...”

“... Kristol. It attracted a host of leftish public intellectual luminaries as contributors, including Arthur Koestler, who in 1950 inaugurated the CCF at its opening congress in Berlin with a ‘Manifesto for Freedom’. Koestler, along with Spender and other ex-communists, also contributed to The God That Failed, a 1949 book edited by the Labour MP Richard ...”

“... the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Lord Rayleigh. Eleanor’s brother was the future prime minister Arthur Balfour. Sidgwick knew a great deal about the inner workings of English politics as the various Irish and imperial crises unfolded throughout the last third of the 19th century; the unease those crises provoked permeated his economics and politics, and he ...”

“... Industrial Revolution. Roe gets this crucial matter right, and the following thoughts are sharp little forays at the edge of his achievement. He tends to misjudge his readership. He thinks we need telling that libertas is ‘from the Latin word for freedom’, but on the same page introduces the poet Bryan Waller Proctor without adding that he wrote under ...”

“... plays do survive – Thomas Drue’s The Duchess of Suffolk, Davenport’s King John and Matilda, Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser, or Glapthorne’s Albertus Wallerstein – and others preserve a sketchy existence through the records of censorship and prosecution. Massinger causes Miss Heinemann some difficulty. She (rightly) contrasts the fundamentally ...”

“... in the order in which they were written, the Garden of Eden is followed by the Court of King Arthur, where Eve’s daughters prove no less dangerous than she herself had been. It’s touch and go, for example, in the scene from Sir Gawain where the knight is visited in his bed-chamber by Bertilak’s wife: He sees her so glorious, so gaily attired. So ...”

“... among immigrants themselves. The number of feminists teaching in the various disciplines also does little to help the case for patriotism, for, not only has patriotism been associated with male chauvinism, it also seems to depend on local, geographical identities, whereas the cause of women generally looks to universal standards of equality and justice. Among ...”

“... due course, Edward himself was to become the first Saxon saint to be formally canonised at Rome. Little remains of Edward’s building, however, for in the 1240s the Plantagenet king Henry III set himself to reconstruct the Abbey in honour of the royal saint. Henry was a sincere devotee of Edward, and the reality of his piety cannot be doubted, manifesting ...”

“... Didion and hotels: My interest in [Didion’s heroine] and her hotel life, a state of mind, has little to do with some misguided romantic notion of living such a life myself. But I find sense and a kind of solace in Didion’s daring to show that the ‘game’, the ‘plot’, the ‘set-up’, the ‘whatever you want to call it’ operates around a ...”

“... to her father (after she revealed the hidden six-shooter): ‘You’ve got yourself one helluva little lady there.’ Later, Nichols herself stands up to the Mob while working as a showgirl (‘You got class, kid’). Forthright on both race and gender issues, she insists on prosecuting and sending down a prominent lawyer for attempted rape (‘when a woman ...”