“... hideous hybrid known as ‘Spanglish’, consume Coca-Cola and cornflakes, and import, as John King’s rather leaden account of the Latin American cinema indicates, so many of its films and so much of its own cinematic language from the United States. Only its literature remains triumphantly free from North American influence – a triumph, however, which ...”

“... the spirit of rural festivities, reflecting the protracted propaganda campaign on their behalf by James I and Charles I. Marcus is open to the attractiveness of the carnival sprit, which had its own radical generosity, setting aside traditional hierarchies and roles in the name of a less individualised sense of humanity. But by the 17th century, when her ...”

“... ornately-dressed flunkeys, they finally reached a mild-mannered, soft-spoken man with the title of King of Kings. The performance reassured the Shah that he was ‘every inch a king’, and the visitors emerged willing to ignore the fact that he was a dictator desperately searching to legitimise the Pahlavis’ humble ...”

“... haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... This in turn might go some way to explaining his psychopathic, prurient hatred for Martin Luther King. Hoover was compulsive in his taping and bugging of King’s highly virile private life, and in his campaign to use the tapes for blackmail. He officiated in the twisted plan to send ...”

“... it, forming Socialisme ou barbarie with a congeries of radicals which eventually included C.L.R. James and the Sino-American, Grace Lee Boggs; free of the French Communist Party, he managed to avoid embroilment in the latter’s dizzying volte-fesses, chronicled by Sartre in Les Mains sales. He sided with the Algerian rebels against his adopted homeland and ...”

“... which confiscated a tenth of the annual value of the property of those who had supported the King. Some Major-Generals were harsher than others. Royalists breathed more easily under Major-General Whalley in the Midlands, where insurrection was held to be relatively unlikely and where Whalley had respectable local connections and was ready to mollify ...”

“... dramatically reduced Indian populations and changed the physical environment. It created what James Merrell called ‘the Indian’s New World’, a world as changed and daunting for Indian peoples as it was for Europeans. For Richter, as for Merrell, Indians are as much a people of history as Europeans and Africans are; they find themselves in the middle ...”

“... the employee of a private trading company. Yet, just as Newport was ultimately acting on behalf of James I, so Cortés’s expedition had been made possible by private Spanish financiers. The ‘king’ Powhatan was clearly no Montezuma, and Newport’s attempt to crown him (with a copper crown) ended in farce. His ...”

“... circumstances. Thus the ‘first edition’ (his term) of Deuteronomy, during the reign of King Josiah in the late seventh century BCE, was the Covenant edition, identifying itself frequently as sefer habrit, the Book of the Covenant, and stressing ancient Near Eastern treaty terms for Israel’s relationship with its God. The next recension was the ...”

“... shipwreck, she spent the better part of five years on pilgrimage, while her husband stayed home in King’s Lynn. After Jerusalem she visited Rome, Santiago de Compostela and York, where she fell foul of the archbishop and narrowly escaped being burned as a heretic. At the age of sixty, she made one last pilgrimage, to the Holy Blood of Wilsnack in ...”

“... dispatched, but Cleopatra Selene was raised by Octavian’s sister and eventually married to the king of Mauretania. On 29 August, Octavian became the pharaoh of Egypt.Famous as its dénouement might be, the career of Marcus Antonius is somewhat shadowy. He was born a nobilis, which under the republic meant he had a consul as ancestor: since the expulsion of ...”

“... sparing herself no end of eventual aggravation.Into this vacancy the editor and biographer James Atlas tentatively ventured. He had made his name with a Life of Delmore Schwartz in 1977 and had matured into a venerable if fidgety fixture in New York publishing. He and Roth had been friendly for decades. Early in their relationship, which began in ...”

“... Like his elder contemporary Henry James, Eça de Queirós belongs to the small and distinguished group of 19th-century novelists who wrote in exile. He was born in 1845 in a remote town of northern Portugal, but spent most of his working life in England and France. He liked to maintain that his novels were fundamentally French, and that he himself was French in everything but his fondness for ballad-singers and cod with onions ...”

“... good manners. The idea that they enjoyed a special relationship with God had a long history, and James I apparently did not feel the least embarrassment in describing himself as the Lord’s vice-gerent on earth. Even as James was lecturing Parliament about the divinity of kings, however, the ideological ground had begun ...”