“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... past the difference between being titled and being entitled. When Kermode accepted the post of King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, he felt he had ‘become a sort of nobody, yet a nobody with a title, with a carnival crown’. A knighthood is not a carnival crown, but the drift of this glancing and complicated book is that no ...”

“... Two; Assassins about American power and its discontents; Show Boat about race relations; and The King and I about imperialism. Unfortunately, his focus on the American theme means that he avoids musicals that have almost nothing to say about America: My Fair Lady, The Lion King (which trumped the aggressively American ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... version of Frankenstein’s monster, at others like the whole beach invading the city as a grainy King Kong. Nor is it clear why the film needs another villain, in the shape of an ambitious photographer exposed as a plagiarist by Peter, and now keen to see Peter dead. He gets transformed by a bit of the black stuff too, although it’s hard to see what ...”

“... Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper columns for the Guardian and the Observer have been reprinted, and he is well launched into the second phase ...”