“... and a wealth of pointed references. An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which follows the misfortunes of Charles Hythloday, a posh young layabout, draws on Yeats’s vision of an aristocratic utopia. In Skippy Dies, which takes place at the private Seabrook College, the beleaguered history teacher, Howard, reads Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and becomes ...”

“... logistics, finance, real estate, technology, entertainment and pharmaceuticals. Bezos is the king of logistics and technology; the queen of logistics, the Walmart heiress Ann Walton, owns the largest US-built motor yacht since the 1930s, Aquila. Yacht-owners on the East Coast include hedge fund managers and real estate tycoons and berth their boats in ...”

“... the events of the late 1960s: racism, riots, the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Russian troop movements, the liberalisation of communism in Czechoslovakia. Where she comes from informs what she sees. After Bobby Kennedy’s murder, she makes a list of ‘Attempted and successful assassinations since the Civil War ...”

“... that broke out in 1919, as later nationalist piety would insist. It is startling to read, in Charles Townshend’s fine study, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader, John O’Leary who, in Yeats’s poem, shared his grave with the corpse of ‘romantic Ireland’, observing that the Brotherhood’s ...”

“... was possible to give names with thinly veiled significance, such as Philanax (‘dear or friendly king’) and Euarchus (‘good ruler’), to characters in an Arcadian romance, as Sir Philip Sidney did. Or, like Edmund Spenser, whom Fowler sees as the great originator of English characteronyms, you might mingle popular pastoral names such as Colin in among ...”

“... sun. No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of: ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ and ...”

“... be honest’ another of his frank-seeming phrases.11 June. Why isn’t more fuss made over Charles Causley? Looking through his Collected Poems to copy out his ‘Ten Types of Hospital Visitor’ I dip into some of his other poems, so many of them vivid and memorable. Well into his eighties, he must be one of the most distinguished poets writing today ...”

“... Conservative Government to ease Jewish disabilities might have borne fruit even in the 1830s, but King George IV declared himself against any change in this direction. At the same time, the Board of Deputies, which since 1760 had claimed to represent Anglo-Jewry, was willing to settle for certain changes in the law and to give up the vision of a Jewish Member ...”

“... subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ...”

“... religious relic. (For years it was the only pre-1930 Hollywood movie – save Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings – regularly shown on American commercial television.) As such, it opens on a mournful note. To the accompaniment of a plaintive pseudo-semitic melody, a series of intertitles identifies the Jews as ‘a race older than civilisation’ whose ...”

“... with one occasional diarist, setting out from the memorial to Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king, sited where the high altar of Waltham Abbey once stood, for a five-day tramp to another heritage marker at Battle Abbey. And on, strength permitting, to the marble effigy of the slaughtered English warrior who is cradled, in serpentine embrace, by his lover ...”

“... Marvel announced, with what seemed to Karl and me great fanfare, the return of Jack Kirby, the king of comics, as an artist-writer – a full ‘auteur’ – on a series of Marvel titles. The announcement wasn’t a question of press conferences or advertisements in other media, only sensational reports on the ‘Bullpen Bulletins’ pages of Marvel ...”

“... and employment. His trip to Rome was ‘not a tourist trip, but a political trip on behalf of the king’: he was angling for an ambassadorship, which he never received. Instead he was appointed mayor of Bordeaux, a ‘political compromise that was made at his expense’. His mayoral term was not a success; caught between irreconcilable pressure groups, he ...”

“... in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1886, the only daughter and second child of the second marriage of Charles Doolittle, professor of astronomy and mathematics and Civil War veteran, and Helen Wolle, from a Moravian background, whose family had long been resident in the area. (Moravian Christians were heirs to the dissident, pietistic, communal ethos of the ...”

“... a not-at-home empathetic flip of the sort we see in Twelfth Night:     alas, alas, say now the King,As he is clement if th’offender mourn,Should so much come too short of your great trespassAs but to banish you: whither would you go?What country, by the nature of your error,Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,To any German ...”