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“... sat there and smoked, but, when I sat on the lavatory, and put my legs up on the stool, I was a king, King Canute, or a great prince, though also a bard. The stories I told myself were of tournaments, and of knightly encounters in which the combatants were represented by the tassels at either end of my dressing-gown ...”

“... better written and more imaginative works on Chanel. There are a few mistakes: Edward VII was not king in 1914, and the mystifying Ballets de Monaco must mean the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. Besides its stumbling prose and unserious tone, this book’s other fault is an absence of sufficient pictures. The reader interested in the subject must seek out ...”

“... for some time now that Bligh was not the celluloid brute portrayed by tyrannical, lashing Charles Laughton and Trevor Howard, and Kennedy takes the process of rehabilitation a credible stage further, though his comparison of Bligh with Mother Teresa is a stage too far for me. His book amply demonstrates, to anyone who still believes in the Hollywood ...”

“... Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, the very title was fighting talk: ideas, in the mannerly Austen? Charles Dickens is nowhere more unregenerately English than in his genial philistinism, allergic to anything that smacks of the doctrinal rather than the affective, while Thackeray was unerringly picked off by Leavis for his ‘clubman’s wisdom’. If ...”

“... of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude that any one of them is better ...”

“... Himself.’ Chesterton saw a banner hanging between two tenement houses: ‘God Bless Christ the King,’ it said. From then on an authoritarian Church and a fragile, insecure State combined to produce a sort of dark ages. It was as though Ireland north and south vied with each other over who could produce the most sectarian state. Censorship, mass ...”

“... are a set, aren’t we? We’re a sort of movement’). Phil is assiduously designing man while Charles Aught gets on ‘terribly well’ inspiring John Donne: ‘He’s really rather a honey. As a matter of fact I usually just give him the first line or two and leave him to get on with it. He’s quite literate.’ But it’s not all hard slog. God gives ...”

“... the Mutiny had consorted perfectly readily with Europeans keeping Indian mistresses, like Sir Charles Metcalfe, or Indian wives, like General Wheeler of Cawnpore fame, had now to bow before the dictates of sexual apartheid. It was a sign of the power stucture under threat and in the first stages of decline. Even so, there were remarkable ...”

“... their majesties’ heads onto bodies sketched out in conventional Islamic fashion, converting the King Emperor and his consort into something very different from their squat Anglo-Germanic selves. Even when British aesthetics were imported into colonies wholesale meanings shifted. Thomas Metcalf remarks that the Parliament building in Ottawa, like ...”

“... more to discrediting a feeble pseudo-Jacobean pamphlet published forty years earlier by the actor Charles Macklin. Compared to his later tour de force in this line, however, these are mere squibs. When Samuel Ireland, unwitting dupe of his 19-year-old son William Henry, published Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William ...”

“... hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake finishing his game of bowls and Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle, they all belonged as much to folklore as to history; and folklore, so far as enlightened opinion was ...”

“... but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory of justice to the whole world. However, they have a dissenter within their ranks, and in a series of articles Mathias Risse has proved an articulate critic of those who seek to exploit the ...”

“... Régime, no word could, en principe, be uttered on stage and no painting exhibited without the king’s leave. Art existed as art only insofar as it was an agreement with the judgment of his cultural arbiters. When the king was beheaded, his authority devolved onto neoclassical conventions to which, half a century ...”

“... Bucharest, Weber was sent to school in England, served in the Second World War as a captain in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, and in the course of his service spent the mid-1940s in India, after earlier stints in Belgium and Germany. Demobilised in 1947, he went to Cambridge, and devoted the rest of his life to history, mostly French history. He ...”

“... There is an old joke about a man returning to his village after his first trip to the city. ‘The king himself spoke to me,’ he boasts to a rapt audience. ‘What did he say?’ they gasp. ‘He said, he actually said, directly, to me, and I was as close as I am to you … he said: “Get out of my way, peasant!”’ And we have to suppose that if the ...”