“... College, the site of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word ...”

“... convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in ...”

“... the category we have come to know, and take for granted, as ‘public opinion’. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man made Habermas’s argument more concrete and detailed: late 17th and 18th-century coffee houses ‘naturally were places where speech flourished’. When a man went into one, he paid an entrance fee of a penny, was told ...”

“... compiled the largest herbal of the 16th century. John Parkinson, who was appointed apothecary to King James, acquired the title of Botanicus Regius Primarius after the publication of his massive folio on the nature and properties of plants, Paradisi in Sole (1629). Both men provided themselves with coats of arms and salaries to match. Neither was quite as ...”

“... it’s fuzzy, sometimes it’s a matter of perspective. Does my daughter believe that the king is the head of state? Well, does that require her to distinguish the state from the government? Or that she understand how the United Kingdom differs from Great Britain? Determining what someone believes is often more like determining whether Hamlet is an ...”

“... seeking support for the Civil Rights movement in the South and in particular for Martin Luther King. The text deplored what the Police and other elements of the then dominant white segregationist forces in the South had done to peaceful protesters against racial discrimination. It said that Dr King had been arrested ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... dense with social detail, and doesn’t represent a comfortable ‘mystification’ any more than King Lear does. What other English novelist evokes the world of work and community within a palpable landscape as Hardy does? Or is less patronising to working people like Gabriel Oak or Tess or even Diggory Venn? Snell’s isn’t the whole story, even if ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... knitted yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah ...”

“... of The Huntsman. According to Gaston Phoebus’s 14th-century Livre de chasse, the hare is ‘king of all venery’. Turner drew and painted several hare chases apart from Rain, Steam and Speed. In one of them, a hare runs over the spot where Harold was felled at the Battle of Hastings. In Apollo and Daphne (c.1837), Daphne prevents Apollo from helping a ...”

“... producer, and he later brought in Norman Mailer to write the book. He showed himself to be the king deal-maker and media broker, the chief documenter, of grand-scale American tragedy. Wherever there has been sensational news in America over the last thirty years, there you will invariably find Lawrence Schiller. Schiller has helped all manner of American ...”

“... are fetched by Gershom, Washington’s Jewish-African slave. ‘Gershom is presently telling King-Joaks – “Actually, they’re Slave-and-Master Joaks, re-tailored for these Audiences. King says to his Fool ...” ’I started looking in my wonderful Brewer’s Dictionary. I discovered, among many other things, that ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”