“... the reading of wounded Tommies and discovered that their favourite authors were Nat Gould, Charles Garvice and E. Phillips Oppenheim. She defended their lowbrow preferences stoutly: ‘Our wounded warriors have surely earned the right to amuse themselves with the books that please them most, and to be free from the kind of officious pedantry that would ...”

“... began to speak of himself as a successor to the imperial Spanish monarchs of the 16th century, to Charles V, who governed most of Europe, and his son Philip II, who sent the Armada against England and built the Escorial to house his bones. He had delusions, too, about the catastrophic state of the Spanish economy during the Second World War and its ...”

“... rhythms and pressures. Verlaine captured the relation perfectly: ‘The profound originality of Charles Baudelaire is ... to represent modern man, powerfully and in his essence ... modern man, with his sharpened, vibrant senses, his painfully subtle mind, his brain saturated with tobacco, his blood burnt with alcohol.’ The ghost in the exhausted machine ...”

“... of the subject’s birth, party politics played a substantial role in the appointment of the King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge, who from this point presided over its growth and development. The Liberal Prime Minister Asquith had originally intended to offer the job to Sir Herbert Grierson, recent editor of the poems of John ...”

“... College, the site of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word ...”

“... written but four of them, at least, rather good. Three of the four are by Richard Usborne, the king of the traditional Wodehouse buffs. The other is by Benny Green, the new broom. Oxford University and the Pierpont Morgan Library are both relevant to Wodehouse’s life. He did not attend a university, though he would have liked to: but he has been much ...”

“... was blown about like that,’ and had him remove unauthorial steps from his illustration to ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’. He was dealing with Pre-Raphaelites, whose notions of fidelity to text were flexible, but Altick describes this kind of confrontation as ‘a favourite form of journalistic pedantry’. Popular taste, which proved unkind to ...”

“... studiously unintellectual, pattern-cut products of the public schools. Alfred Tennyson’s Uncle Charles, convinced that his family was descended from the Medieval d’Eyncourts, devoted his patrimony to converting a modest Lincolnshire house into the imposing Bayons Manor, ‘the most convincing re-creation yet put up in England of the manor house of a ...”

“... found in the stirrings of drum and guitar; or, deep as dimples, high as a quiff, on the heads of King and Queen Rockers from this time and that. This has given rise to some champion moments in recent writing; some excellent, warm-hearted excursions to the centre of our listening and imagining worlds – see Greil Marcus, Nik Cohn – and yet it has also ...”

“... estate in Leeds: but right bang on top of the interview list if her old man happens to be the next king of England. Early on in Diana: Her True Story (isn’t that a nice title?), I find myself vindicated in my zinging light theory by best friend Carolyn, who assures us: ‘I’m not a terribly spiritual person but I do believe that she was meant to do what ...”

“... Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies reviewed by Lane that he lists: Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart, The Bridges of Madison County, Crash, Con ...”

“... Muslim geographers stretching from al-Masudi (888-957), the ‘Herodotus of the Arabs’, to King Roger II of Sicily’s court cartographer al-Idrisi (1099-1166) and Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Ibn Battutah’s younger contemporary who wrote the vast work of historical sociology known as the Kitab al-Ibar. It’s fitting, too, that all we know of Ibn ...”

“... like lichen and, on closer inspection, like blight. Monk and Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, Nat King Cole (the After Midnight Sessions with Sweets Edison, Stuff Smith and Juan Tizol), Ralph Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys, Ray Charles. And towards the end of the day, with the setting sun doing something wonderful ...”

“... the Church of the Holy Sepulchre). The tale of exclusion that started in a cowshed ends with the King of the Jews shut out from the would-be capital of his people, an apt incongruity for one whose kingdom was not of this world. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown notes that walls symbolise the will to closure. As inherited tracts of ...”

“... on a sexual sense of merry that was standard early modern slang. (Rochester famously wrote of Charles II, with no implication that the king was cheerful: ‘Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,/A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.’) Curll’s obscene publication, flogging a single schoolboy joke to ...”