“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to settle on whether to speak to him from inside or outside his own voice. In his ‘Tomb of Charles Baudelaire’, Mallarmé called his predecessor a ‘poison tutélaire/Toujours à respirer si nous en périssons’ (‘a tutelary poison/we breathe always though we die of it’). It’s a neat way of imagining the powerful poet as the air we ...”

“... credit for the outcome. With the Armistice in place, he returned home to receive the accolades of king and country. Elevated to a peerage, he became Earl Haig of Bemersyde. Then with almost unseemly haste, he was eased into oblivion. In the war’s aftermath, Winston Churchill wrote, Haig ‘was given no work. He did not join in the counsels of the nation; he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Max Palevsky and Malick himself. It was based on the story of a Nebraska hoodlum called Charles Starkweather (Martin Sheen), who in 1957 killed the father of 14-year-old Caril Ann Fugate (Sissy Spacek, 23 at the time), and then took off with her on the lam across the desolate spaces of legend.Badlands drew on movies like Gun Crazy and Bonnie and ...”

“... and retaining power. There has been something called a Tory Party in England since the reign of Charles II, and though one would be hard put to find much resemblance between the ‘Church and King’ Tories and the rabble who contested the leadership of the Conservative Party last year, it is without question the most ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... their son. The séances were so successful that her fiancé’s father, a French general, invited Charles Richet, a professor of physiology at the Sorbonne who was well known for his interest in psychic matters, to attend them; Richet soon declared himself fully persuaded that Béraud was genuine. Not long afterwards, Marthe Béraud confessed to trickery. She ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fitting.’ A ready-made Pop Art collage, it consecrated absolute celebrity, the President and the King. The presidency, Norman Mailer observed during Nixon’s 1972 bid for re-election, is ‘a primitive office and inspires the tribes of America to pick up the modes and manners of their chief’. Two genres that thrived under the Nixon presidency were the ...”

“... Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, whose biblical characters stand for identifiable Englishmen (King David is Charles II, Absalom Monmouth, Achitophel Shaftesbury, and so on); but like Dryden, Milton creates an Old Testament setting evocative of the English political landscape, and, like Dryden’s, Milton’s political ...”