“... but don’t laugh, Because Henry VIII couldn’t swim a stroke And if you ever want to see a true king you should watch Weissmuller In Tarzan Escapes cavorting underwater with Boy In the clear river with networks of light on the shelving sand Over which they fly weightless to hide from each other behind the log While Jane wonders where they are. You will ...”

“... entrance to the British Museum’s Persian exhibition, Forgotten Empire (on until 8 January), the King of Many Peoples looms high on a rectangular relief. He dwarfs the attendant who reaches up from behind to shade his big imperial head, ready with a towel to dab away the imperial sweat. His Highness (probably Xerxes) sits rod-spined on a high-backed ...”

“... 2012 at the headquarters of the Order of St Augustine in Rome. Among the speakers was Karen King, the first woman to hold the Hollis Professorship of Divinity, Harvard’s oldest endowed chair. King had made her name as an interpreter and champion of early Christian texts that asserted the spiritual authority of women ...”

“... tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on.’ Two months earlier, Roe described a durbar held in Burhanpur by Jahangir’s son, Parvez, as being akin to ‘a great stage’, with Parvez seated like the ‘mock ...”

“... power to exemplify the macrocosmos has relentlessly declined since the creation, by a god-king, of the Balinese civilisation, and this decline in the symbolic power of the state is correlated with a reduction in the sacred character of the royalty of the island. Yet, paradoxically (for reasons Geertz fails to explain), the assumption of sinking status ...”

“... masterless man.’ Others prefer the judgment of the Australian judge and historian James Spigelman: Coke’s mind ‘was so narrow and unsubtle, so incapable of jettisoning detail, so often inconsistent, that no one has ever speculated that he wrote the works of Shakespeare’. That perverse distinction has of course been conferred on Coke’s ...”

“... but Joseph Heller’s novel is not deliberately anti-Jewish. It is meant to be an autobiography of King David, the sweet singer of Israel, as told by a wisecracking New Yorker who fancies himself as a Jewish wit. Cocteau once said of the French child poet, Minou Drouet: ‘All children are poets, except Minou.’ Something like that might be said of Joseph ...”

“... christened John and the vast majority of the other men and boys around at the time were Joseph, James, Thomas or William. Around 1850, however, the repertoire of names in regular use began to increase rapidly. As Gothic-looking steeples rose around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and ...”

“... are, Patai explains, according to Talmudic cosmology, tohu, of the tohu bohu translated in the King James Bible as ‘without form and void’; an essential part of the chaos which was all there was before God separated and ordered the world into existence. These were the seas that contained Rahab, Leviathan and other sea monsters which, sings the ...”

“... example of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court ...”

“... one of my feet or maybe even my neck.’ And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete ...”

“... begins with a famous largo, ‘Shade as it never was’ (Ombra mai fu), sung by the self-same King of Kings to his beloved: a plane tree. Aelian, a collector of amazing historical facts, provides the fullest account of this bizarre episode: That Xerxes fellow was a clown … he was slavishly devoted to a plane tree, as if the tree was something to be ...”

“... In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV ...”

“... to make their employees conform to their technology rather than the other way around. Insta-Burger King, later to become Burger King, used to have machines which made milkshakes and burgers automatically. Prospective franchisees were told: ‘Both machines have been thoroughly perfected … are of foolproof design – can be ...”

“... took his pulse in disbelief. Now, the monk’s mechanical likeness, commissioned by a pious king for an impetuous son, would offer similar testimony to the power of saintly bodies. The automaton resides today in the Smithsonian, reminding us of humanity’s long-standing desire to create life that survives death – an impulse once fulfilled through ...”