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“... This in turn might go some way to explaining his psychopathic, prurient hatred for Martin Luther King. Hoover was compulsive in his taping and bugging of King’s highly virile private life, and in his campaign to use the tapes for blackmail. He officiated in the twisted plan to send ...”

“... skyscraper he planned to build on Park Avenue in New York. Bronfman, the Canadian ‘whisky king’ who owned Seagram distillers, had commissioned Pereira & Luckman to create a gleaming metal and glass edifice that resembled a decanter gift set. ‘This letter starts with one word repeated very emphatically NO NO NO NO NO,’ Lambert responded when she ...”

“... Richard II as the first move towards the performance of Phaethon – not just because of what the King says about Phaethon (‘Down, down’ I come, like glist ‘ring Phaethon ...’), but also because a school-play is the nearest we now get to the duality of the masque, even though the school-play is usually lopped of political topicality. (Yet Richard II ...”

“... The names of the actors appear briefly on a dark screen. We hear the sound of a car on a road. A title reads: ‘This film is based on a true story.’ Then we see a large American car from the back, driving at night on the wrong, that is, on the left side of the road. The car swerves into the right lane, the camera stays in the left, catches up, comes alongside the car ...”

“... Unlike their late 20th-century descendants, contemporary Englishmen knew what that meant: an adult king, of the right religious persuasion, and with a family. Fifty years of that abnormal phenomenon, petticoat government, 45 of a monarch without an heir, and, more immediately, ten of the gloom and doom caused by a sterile war, economic distress and mounting ...”

“... of the development of our country in time’ – ‘our country’ meaning something different for King Alfred and Queen Victoria, but ‘the state structure built round the English monarchy’ being the core of it. I am not sure that this is any harder a job to do now than it was for Clark and his authors, who, Roberts says, shared with their readers ‘a ...”

“... be with you, Balliol men!’ Was Aubrey Herbert, this human plum, ever ripe enough to be king of Albania, a country which twice offered him the throne? After finishing Margaret FitzHerbert’s excellent book the reader may be in two minds; at least King Aubrey would have wielded the sceptre with more panache than ...”

“... Geoffrey Hill’s second collection of poems, King Log, was published in 1968, that year of student radicalism and disappointment. Hill’s title is reactionary in its implications and derives from Aesop’s fable of the frogs who desired a king. In my edition of L’Estrange’s royalist version of Aesop the fable runs like this: The Frogs, living an easy, free life everywhere among the lakes and ponds, assembled together, one day, in a very tumultuous manner, and petitioned Jupiter to let them have a King ...”

“... a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental detail. Less ambitious, but more subversive, Christopher Stevenson and Hugh Nissenson seek to dismantle the system from within by producing novels which look like something else altogether: a form of experimentation which often has rather puritanical motives behind it – the assumption being either that ...”

“... translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An exceptional, incomparable novel’. Le Roi des Aulnes is the only novel to have won the Prix Goncourt by unanimous decision, but Les Météores has enjoyed less ...”

“... of a century; Lawrence Stone guided my first steps into the maze of Anglo-American historiography; Christopher Hill accompanied, a long time ago now, the infant squawks of my early Marxism, which today is much eroded. Though if I still preserve some traces of my belief in that doctrine, I owe it to the high abilities of such ci-devant Marxist historians as ...”

“... one can be certain whether adults are speaking seriously, or think it funny if they are not. Christopher Logue who has compiled The Children’s Book of Comic Verse for Batsford, and Julia Watts in The Children’s Book of Funny Verse (Faber), have both grasped the essentials about a child’s sense of humour – far better than the 1935 editors of The ...”

“... was Morris’s first book of poems, appearing in 1858, the year before Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Ballads inspired by (or possibly the inspiration of) Rossetti’s water-colours stand side by side with hard-edged Froissartian themes ‘The Haystack in the Floods’, ‘The Judgment of God’. Here Joyce Tompkins believes that modern readers are adrift ...”

“... the end of the decade the baddies are as likely to be Germans as shiftless cosmopolitans, and in King Ottokar’s Sceptre, started in 1938, Tintin prevents the annexation – modelled on the Anschluss – of a lovingly imagined Balkan country where an offstage demagogue called Müsstler plans to overthrow a Belgian-style monarch. Tintin had recently, believe ...”

“... Centre for Islamic Studies, a body of which he serves as patron.* (Royal seals are not wanting in King Charles’s old royalist military HQ: the other two patrons are the House of Saud and the sultan of Brunei, the latter best-known for his under-the-table donation of a few off-the-record millions to the cause of the Nicaraguan Contras.) Anyway, in his ...”