“... they have encountered over the centuries in combining the roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... who survived the Flood by riding astride the Ark, is derived from a rabbinical story of Og, King of Bashan. He also suggests that Rabelais was sympathetic to the ‘Ancient Theology’, the idea of a special revelation to non-Christian sages like Orpheus, Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus. The medical and legal allusions are in even greater need of ...”

“... President of the Royal Society. His success had something to do with his friendship with the King, and the astronomers and mathematicians tended not to regard him as their intellectual equal. But he was assiduous, regular in his attendance at council meetings, and eager to promote the Society’s interest. It was around the Society that the most ...”

“... acclaim and insult – for the critical reaction against Kerouac set in almost immediately – the King of the Beats wavered alarmingly between bitter self-disgust and wild exhibitionist boasting. Unwilling to stand so close to the spectacle of disintegration or to compete with relentless groupies, Johnson finally broke off the relationship in the autumn of ...”

“... invited), and a jolly good party (to which he was) at the College of Heralds with Garter Principal King of Arms, where the forthcoming full-colour photofacsimile of Domesday Book was advertised by Publications Alecto. Meanwhile, in the Great Hall at Winchester, the Phillimore edition was exhibited, and the Alecto facsimile again advertised, in the very place ...”

“... school up the road – ever saw, and I appreciated it. Round a corner or two in Petty Cury was King Street, where there stood a rank of pubs. A rite of passage in those days was to inhale a pint of suds in each within the space of an hour – the ‘King Street run’ – without puking, or without puking until the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... swooned over Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and sung and danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I. This is a way of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most unlikely not to have seen herself full-length in a mirror before she got to the ...”

“... the kings of Northumbria and Mercia and East Anglia and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when King Alfred ...”

“... who had arrived in England in the 1580s, but had earlier been sent to South America by the French king.) White’s most decorated Pict has heraldic animal heads on chest and knees, but it is still possible to think of them as tattoos. Le Moyne’s maiden is pretty, blonde, and decorated all over with botanical studies that could have come from a Book of ...”

“... yet we can see that the two halves would actually fit together. The gap should not be there. What Peter James – the main author and incidentally the designer of the jacket – and his four collaborators seek to prove is, put simply, that the entire early history of the civilised world has been similarly distorted. An intrusive, imaginary gap, partly of ...”

“... crucial 17-page document is missing from The Freud-Klein Controversies, and in a footnote Pearl King explains that no copy was attached to the minutes of the meeting of 9 February 1944 at which it had been presented. It can, however, be found in the Klein Archives, and I would urge the editors to rectify their oversight by publishing it in the International ...”

“... Joan Smyth par amours, and knowing her cuckoldy knave of a husband to be little better than a King Mark, carried her off behind him ... he may have done what a good knight should.’ In any case, Lewis claimed, ‘cuckoldy knaves’ apart, none of the charges was proved: ‘what should we think of Tristram himself if our knowledge of him were derived only ...”

“... law, all those declared purus idiota (a quasi-medical category ruled on by a jury) belonged to the king, who could bestow them and their property on any party able to make a strong enough case to claim them. (‘Begging for a fool’, as this was known, was often financially motivated.) Fools could also be acquired circumstantially. Those who were established ...”