“... Accounts vary as to how he gained the nickname El Cid, from sidi, the Arabic honorific ‘my lord’. It is often traced to his conquered Muslim subjects in Valencia, who, the story goes, welcomed him. Yet at the time others too were called ‘mio Cid’, as the Arabic loan word served as a fairly common epithet for Castilian nobles. Another, now ...”

“... Act making it a crime to publish false criticism of the Government or its leaders – and that James Madison, the principal author of the First Amendment, had condemned the Act. It was a violation, he said, not only of the freedom of speech and press but of the whole premise of our new Constitution: that the people were to make the ultimate political ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... as having ‘made a corner in millionaires and lonely elderly artists’ (among them Kipling, Lord Kitchener, W.W. Astor, Rodin, Lutyens and Henry Ford), was determined to get the painting back. She also hoped that Morgan would buy tapestries, carpets and other items from the estate at Knole. ‘Fluent in the language of covert glances and studied ...”

“... about after the dazzlement is over. Brian Levack and Linda Levy Peck write about the reign of James I, a subject to which Professor Hexter returned recently with a devastating attack on the so-called ‘revisionists’: those who believe either that the English Civil War was an accident with no causes at all or that it was the product of aristocratic ...”

“... One of the odder political books I have read is The Abuse of Power, by James Margach, the veteran lobby correspondent of the Sunday Times. Published in 1978, the book was subtitled with a flourish: ‘The war between Downing Street and the media from Lloyd George to Callaghan’. For 40 years and more, Margach had enjoyed the confidence of prime ministers ...”

“... wrote of ‘a chilly fear’ that had crept into the ‘old squirearchical life’. In 1934 Lord Lothian alerted the National Trust to the rising problems facing the owners of large country houses. Meanwhile there were other fictional portrayals of the final dismal collapse. In The House that Berry Built (published in January 1945) Dornford Yates went ...”

“... Jacobite, married another one, was imprisoned after Culloden, escaped to France and died in exile. James (‘poor unlucky Jamie’) was huge and clumsy, jilted an heiress, married a penniless English widow and eventually became a Dumfriesshire MP. Alexander began as a soldier and bought a slave plantation in Grenada. Betty never married but stayed at home ...”

“... for ‘T.S. Eliot’ was ‘litotes’). It’s noteworthy that Eliot appears by name in Letter to Lord Byron (1937), where Auden laments the fact that Eliot finds his addressee ‘uninteresting’. Like Byron, Auden would reinvent himself from abroad, and his move to the US in 1939 was in many respects a resistance to what was expected of him. Although he had ...”

“... to fresh troubles – until the time came for a genocidal pacification, ordered by none other than James I, and Armstrong said his last good night. Nationality counted for very little, compared with family. Perpetually at feud among themselves, a community of predator victims straddled the frontier, as did a population of the defenceless: ‘The poor and those ...”

“... and mostly honourable performer. He could be a witty, sometimes moving memoirist – on Henry James, for instance, or on the mood in London at the declaration of World War One – and several of his essays thoroughly deserve (as he might well have put it) not to be forgotten. Also, when he took the trouble, he was a persuasive ‘close reader’ (see his ...”

“... pencil. As late as 1771, at the beginning of the decade of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and of James Watt’s steam engine, the Encyclopaedia Britannica could still define pencils, not as lead pencils with points, but as brushes of hair or bristles used by artists to lay on colours, and could list the materials employed in their making as ...”

“... heroes of Empire were never the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened ...”

“... which states that in the end-time the elect will be ‘caught up ... in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air’. Though splendid for the elect, this development inevitably means trouble for everybody else: airliners, their born-again captains raptured, will hurtle about the sky and then crash; on the freeways the cars of the elect will be driverless, to ...”

“... in the French and Dutch religious wars to England’s advantage. Elizabeth’s prime minister, Lord Burghley, thought so. But ‘forward’ Protestants regarded the proposed marriage with profound distaste. Leaving aside certain personal and biological impediments, they believed that this mésalliance would mean a political regression to absolutism on the ...”