“... of the Celtic lands is seen as the preparatory school or training-ground of empire-building. James VI and I patronised a scheme for a ‘plantation’ or colony in the Hebrides, as well as the one in Ulster. An English-speaking élite in these areas acquired attitudes of racial superiority which were extended to Africans and Indians. Men like Raleigh and ...”

“... for him. He was to marry his first cousin, Victoria, a few months his senior, and as de facto king of England he would work for the creation of a united Germany under Prussia. Studious, intelligent and good-natured, Albert put his shoulder to the dynastic wheel. By the age of 16 he was writing an essay on German national character. Victoria ...”

“... of the Quran appeared. Its Royalist translator had intended to dedicate the book to the king, as Matthew Dimmock noted in Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture; after the regicide, he added a preface in which he used the figure of a bloodthirsty, power-hungry Muhammad to convey his condemnation of Charles’s ...”

“... came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers ...”

“... in 1967. His house stands within two sets of walls, those of the ancient Armenian convent of St James and, beyond them, the Turkish walls of Jerusalem’s old city. The convent is a haven, in the same sense Israel calls itself a haven, in which descendants of Armenians who escaped Turkey’s First World War massacres still live. When he was director of the ...”

“... There may be an explanation for this deferential attitude in the acknowledgments, where ‘HM King Carl XVI Gustaf’ gets a special mention ‘for his accommodating attitude to my work, which deals so intimately with his great grandmother, Queen Victoria of Sweden’. You have to wonder, though, what difference, if any, it would have made to the book had ...”

“... that during the school holidays his father would drop him off in the morning at a snooker club in King’s Cross before heading into Soho for work. The club was his crèche, he recalled fondly, though he admits it wasn’t ideal for a child to spend so much time around adults and cigarette smoke. He made his first century break – scoring more than a ...”

“... the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced ...”

“... without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and ...”

“... Hamlet marks the point of transition to the new dynamics of the reign of James. As the Prince increasingly uses the terms employed by artisans and the lower orders, he seems to commit himself to a language learned from the politically voiceless, and thus to become their mouthpiece. To the Court this signifies madness.Madness of a ...”

“... the disfiguring effects of oppression on the minds of the oppressed: as he wrote in his preface to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, ‘injustice, injury, humiliation and insecurity can be as unbearable as hunger.’ While he insisted on the specificity of each form of oppression – analysis had to begin with ‘le vécu’, the concrete, unique ...”

“... and the City’s creator and its second lead writer were gay men, Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, prompting one of the Girls cast, Jemima Kirke, to say of Dunham’s series: ‘It’s not Sex and the City … That’s four gay men sitting around talking.’ Meanwhile Issa Rae, the Black creator of HBO’s Insecure (2016-21), defended Dunham against ...”

“... Spectator, once suavely edited, now serves as a fraternity house for Douglas Murray, Toby Young, James Delingpole and Rod Liddle; pummelling Muslims and high-fiving on Brexit, these right-wing bros are to the posh periodicals what Jeremy Clarkson was to the BBC. Murray’s book-length screed, The Strange Death of Europe, is full of Trump-style imaginings of ...”

“... Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das Meer’ (‘Desolate and empty the sea’). James Miller was the first critic inspired by Peter’s speculations and the appearance of the drafts to attempt a thorough outing of Eliot. His T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (1977) offered ‘new interpretations’ of much of Eliot’s early work, and found ...”

“... 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 ...”