“... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...”

“... commission in March 1946. Four months later Begin’s group, the Irgun, bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, the headquarters of the Mandate administration, killing more than ninety people. The orders had come from the chief of the Haganah National Command, who told Begin to ‘carry out that little hotel thing at the earliest ...”

“... subject to delays. The obscure origins of the University are carefully reconstructed. In Sir Richard Southern’s distinction, Oxford was not ‘created’ – it ‘emerged’. The contributors explain the significance of its geographical location and its importance as a centre of legal activity. They discuss how it separated from the town and the ...”

“... too good or too bad to need defending; it’s guaranteed that anyone willing to read a volume on King Crimson, say, or Crosby, Stills and Nash, is already on board. Then there is the curse of Dylanology, such a blight on pop criticism: worship of lyrics as ‘poetry’, modelled on pop’s least representative major figure. This sort of writing fails the ...”

“... brightly, perhaps, on Iselin. I love Iselin and I believe in her. She just wants to eat Burger King and then more Burger King, while inner-monologuing like this:What was it I’d thought in the loo while I’d been doing my make-up?That I looked exotic with my gold eyeshadow. Arabian nights, passionate and strong.On my ...”

“... her to the attention of the editors at Partisan Review, who began publishing her criticism: Richard Wright, Faulkner, Hart Crane, the Goncourts – Hardwick could turn her hand to almost anything. When Philip Rahv met her, he was struck by her gumption. He asked her what she thought of Diana Trilling: ‘Not much.’ ‘I weighed about ten pounds ...”

“... in the magazines and plays cricket for the Allahakbarries (a conflation of ‘Allahu Akbar’ and J.M. Barrie, the team’s founder); Jerome K. Jerome and Arthur Conan Doyle were also members. He had already met Conan Doyle’s sister Constance (Connie) on holiday, and the two men had become friends. By the time that Hornung, Doyle and Jerome visit the Black ...”

“... that before being sworn in he had himself anointed with cooking oil in the biblical manner of King David. Ashcroft chose Carl Esbeck, who had directed the Center for Law and Religious Freedom run by the conservative Virginia-based Christian Legal Society, as the first chief of the department’s faith-based office. He named Eric Treene, former litigation ...”

“... instrument of the same kind: it was adopted during a brief period when Britain had neither a king nor a Parliament (James II having first dissolved Parliament and then fled), by an ad hoc convention which offered William of Orange the Crown, accompanied by a Declaration of Rights which the convention, endorsed the next year by a lawfully summoned ...”

“... Another – The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1955), The Silmarillion (1977) – is J.R.R. Tolkien.A writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English ...”

“... The Fellowship of the Ring appeared in July 1954, The Two Towers in November and The Return of the King almost a year later, in October 1955. Lewis wrote a dust-jacket puff: ‘No imaginary world has been projected which is at once so multifarious and so true to its inner laws.’ You do not have to admire the book to think that this was true. It is clear from ...”

“... became an active member of the Communist Party, responsible for organisation at the university. King Alexander’s secret police arrested him in 1933 for carrying a gun he planned to use to break party members out of jail. He won the respect of the underground for his courage under torture. In Yugoslavia, as elsewhere across Europe, prisons were the school ...”

“... already in the Savarin can? It also calls up a fool’s cap, and early on Johns was both king and pawn of a New York art world revved up by a new market. (He knew it too: the bronze Ballantines were said to be provoked by a remark from de Kooning that Leo Castelli could sell anything, even two beer cans.)In short, painting as rebus has its ...”

“... when it reached London: ‘Captured in Egypt by the British Army in 1801’ and ‘Presented by King George III’.On 27 September 1822, Jean-François Champollion wrote his Lettre à M. Dacier, presenting to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres his system for reading Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, derived from the Rosetta Stone. He finally set ...”

“... inevitable fixture that it can accommodate the most disparate material. Here is section 175: Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was Henry He called for his butts – he called for his bowl – he called for his fiddlers three in vain. Blank prose took hold of Henry’s soul considering all the deaths and considering. There is a little ...”