“... conciliatory, too ready to put up with, even to proselytise for, the morally mediocre life, as if King Lear were to get used to the hospitality of Goneril and Regan. I think now the pain of the film is too intense for that. No one is just putting up with anything, everyone is putting a brave face on things, quite a different operation. The characters in ...”

“... Shaka King’s​ Judas and the Black Messiah (available on Amazon Prime) leaves us in no doubt as to who is the more interesting character. This preference is obscured (or perhaps highlighted) by the fact that the actors playing the two parts (LaKeith Stanfield and Daniel Kaluuya) have both been nominated as ‘best supporting actor’ at this year’s Oscars, as if there were no main role, or it might be dangerous to say which it is ...”

“... Now that works such as Francis Haskell’s Patrons and Painters (first published in 1963) and Michael Levey’s Painting at Court (1971) have made the social history of art respectable, it is becoming quite difficult to remember the time when it was virtually restricted, or abandoned, to a handful of Central European Marxist émigrés such as Frederick ...”

“... established the orthodoxies of the future, as in 431 or 451; and no one decided to rule Italy as a king for the first time in a millennium, as would happen in 476. On the other hand, we know next to nothing about so many fifth-century years that 428, with its relative bounty of evidence, is actually quite extraordinary. Sources that did not exist even a decade ...”

“... both his friends and his enemies feared, with good reason, that he intended to make himself king, a title hated by republican aristocrats with a nearly superstitious fervour. Augustus, however, disclaimed regal ambitions and presented his new regime as a restoration of the republic, even though all real military power, and pretty much all civil ...”

“... the numbering of monarchs dates from 1066. That Charles III’s great-uncle was the eighth King Edward, for instance, ignores Edward the Confessor, despite William the Conqueror claiming the throne as his kinsman as well as by his royal gift. From this perspective, the kingdom of England began in 1066. In other respects, it was already in existence. In ...”

“... between master and servant provided a template for almost every kind of affiliation: between king and courtier, ruler and subject, patron and client, commander and soldier, employer and apprentice, or even between husband and wife, parent and child, mistress and lover. ‘Trust and service’, a character in Middleton’s The Witch (c.1616) declares, are ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore ...”

“... Superman says with a mixture of pride and associative guilt – the creature is a cyber version of King Kong made of kryptonite. The new ally is tidy and resolute, looks like a fashion model who has been in the Israeli army, and not only because Gal Gadot, who plays the part, is a fashion model who was in the Israeli army. ‘I’ve killed creatures from other ...”

“... the film’s most unpleasant as well as most unhistorical moves is its annexing of Martin Luther King’s life and death to Kennedy’s: Kennedy, it is implied in shots of dancing children, of a grieving father and daughter, was the real hero of black Americans, their promised saviour, King’s death merely a corroboration ...”

“... to a very different audience, to the local Syrians and Arabs who liked being ruled by a local ‘king of kings’, who could defend them from the more distant, and more rapacious, Shapur. For a few years, Odaenathus was able to live out a fantasy version of Hellenistic monarchy, in a manner that the Romans had made impossible 200 years earlier, when they ...”

“... countryside, buses, food, movies, rickshaws, cows, boys playing cricket, takeout from Pizza King – but the low-level gangster atmosphere resembles that of the New Jersey of Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog. When Rajiv Gandhi is killed, Mr Gupta is asked to switch his loyalties to the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), indeed to stand as ...”

“... In the fall of 2002, in the company of a dog named Charlie Chaplin and an architect named Michael Meredith, I set out to drive a 1960 Chevy Apache 10 pick-up truck, at 45 mph, from far west Texas to New York City: 2364 miles through desert, suburbs, forests, lake-spattered plains, mountains, farmland, more suburbs and the Holland Tunnel ...”

“... a blizzard on Palm Sunday, he took the throne from the weak, ineffectual Henry VI and was crowned King Edward IV.Usurpers were plentiful in the 15th century. Edward’s claim was by lineal descent from Edward III, and was a strong one if you ignored the deposition of Richard II in 1399. In the mid-1450s, Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father and ...”

“... pursuits to write imitation Agatha Christie detective stories, so when I first learned that Michael Dummett, widely regarded as the most formidable philosopher of his generation, was about to publish a book about Tarot cards, I rather naturally assumed that it must be an exercise of this same recreational sort. In a certain very off-centre sense, my ...”