“... that won’t make him feel like a coward. In his introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s King Jasper, he quotes a couplet from Robinson’s ‘Flammonde’ – ‘One pauses half afraid/To say for certain that he played’ – and adds: his much-admired restraint lies wholly in his never having let grief go further than it could in play. So far shall ...”

“... These men and women had been noticed before: they were the ‘silent majority’ invoked by Richard Nixon. The speechwriter who coined that phrase, Pat Buchanan, would become the insurgent Republican of the 1992 primaries, and at the 1992 party convention he gave a speech that seems the prototype for Trump’s inaugural. In fact, Trump delivered no ...”

“... among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for doctors to take part in the protests) and even a handful of ...”

“... the Muslim armies profited from the unpopul-arity of the ruling Visigoths. In July, Tarik defeated King Roderic, and the local population flocked to join the army that had rid them of an oppressive ruler. By the autumn, Córdoba and Toledo had both fallen. As it became clear that Tarik was determined to take the whole peninsula, an envious Musa bin Nusayr left ...”

“... whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in surprisingly sympathetic ways, joined in the chorus of condemnation of the ‘medical brutality’ which ...”

“... They had royal connections. Pol Pot’s cousin was a palace dancer and ‘favourite wife’ to a king. An elder brother found employment as a lackey, and the future dictator joined him at court when he was six. As Kiernan points out, ‘he never worked a rice field or knew much of village life ... few Cambodian childhoods were so removed from their ...”

“... going anywhere fast, no matter how gentrified the area. Tower Hamlets, according to its MP, Oona King, is the nation’s heroin capital. More long-term unemployed people live here than in any other borough, and many of them are young Bangladeshi men. These guys are Cockneys by geography and in self-image too. Walls and bus shelters are daubed with gang names ...”

“... jurist who served on the Court during the country’s brief moment of independence under King Faisal in 1920. Later, he wrote a book on the French Mandate that robbed Syria of its independence. Jacques said that his family could not just walk away from all this. Things were getting better in Syria, he believed, but he feared that American ...”

“... than with a woman’. By early November, about the time Kennedy was squeaking out a victory over Richard Nixon, Ann became pregnant. She was still a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday. They were secretly married on 2 February 1961 in Maui, but it is unclear how long they actually lived together. Scott reports that Ann’s friends suspected she knew early on ...”

“... In Smart City, Donald Trump is a good thing. He makes the faultline visible. The gold-topped King Ubu of the internet has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all the self-serving, reflex mendacity of political operators with a more emollient pitch. The man is visible. He is loud enough to be heard across ...”

“... boys; both Jewish; both were ladled with mother-love as sons, Mailer fussed over as ‘the little king’ and Podhoretz doted on by the women in his family as destiny’s darling, cooing over ‘the blue of my eyes, at the thick curliness of my hair, at the streak of grey on its side (proof, they said, echoing an ancient superstition, that I was among the ...”

“... writers, Camus ‘was prepared for the postwar spectacle of American racism’. He had also read Richard Wright, whose work he arranged to be translated by Gallimard. Yet in his North American diaries he has little to say about the ‘Negro Question’, other than that a Martinican employee of the French embassy, forced to rent in Harlem, had only just ...”

“... desecrated in 1793. The camera lingers on a 13th-century bas relief of demons taunting the soul of King Dagobert, a drama in stone whose protagonist she dignifies, like the prisoner under duress in Monangambeee. In the voiceover, we hear the words of the Abbé Suger, the first abbot of Saint-Denis, and funeral orations by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet; the score ...”

“... on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities. Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the ...”

“... the interval I stood in line for the men’s room with the philosopher Tom Nagel, the sociologist Richard Sennett, the poet Fred Seidel and the conservative sage William Buckley. I suppose Brendel’s intellectual and technical mastery is about the only kind to which sensible people of almost every description want to pay tribute, even if to do so involves a ...”