“... When​ King Fahd of Saudi Arabia discovered in late November 1990 that his friend Margaret Thatcher had been turfed out of Downing Street after 11 years he thought she must have been the victim of a coup d’état. How else to explain it? She was undefeated in general elections and, more puzzling still, she was about to send her armed forces into battle ...”

“... school for three hundred years, explained that in phrases like Rex et Regina beati, ‘the blessed King and Queen’, the adjective beati is plural (agreeing in number with Rex et Regina) and masculine (agreeing in gender with Rex), because ‘the masculine gender is more worthy than the feminine, and the feminine more worthy than the neuter.’ (In ...”

“... to see its appeal. Eraserhead might have vanished if it hadn’t been for Ben Barenholtz, the king of New York’s midnight movie scene, who had also popularised Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘acid Western’ El Topo and John Waters’s ‘filth epic’ Pink Flamingos. Waters – a direct contemporary but no eagle scout – was another early ...”

“... unrecorded meeting of the ‘Inner Cabinet’ four months earlier (24 July). The attendance of Richard Mulcahy at that restricted meeting is, I am sure, correctly ascribed to the fact that he was Chief of Staff of the Army, while the presence of Erskine Childers is explained on the grounds that he was Substitute Director of Publicity. However, in the list ...”

“... a protocol, or draft treaty, was ready for signature in Montreal. The chief American negotiator, Richard Benedick, conceding that the science was still far from precise, pleaded for a rapid response. ‘If we are to err in designing measures to protect the ozone layer, then let us, conscious of our responsibility to future generations, err on the side of ...”

“... projects. Among the constructors, there was some outright fraud: George Hudson, the ‘railway king’, ran his business as a pyramid scheme. By 1850, those £100 of shares were only worth £70, and speculators who’d failed to leave the party early were ruined. The point about railway mania isn’t that it opened people’s eyes to the folly of expecting ...”

“... cultural revival. Georgians were making stupendous films; the Rustaveli Theatre’s production of Richard III pulverised Edinburgh audiences who understood not a word of the language. The nation was rediscovering its past, and falling in love with what it discovered. One favourite anecdote told of a senior Georgian Communist who was expelled from the party ...”

“... anti-Catholic or anti-Jewish clichés – Jesuits in cowl and robe conspiring to set a Catholic king on the English throne, or Jews drinking the blood of a Christian child? The anti-Catholic swipe would be looked on as a bizarre eccentricity, of no controversial interest at all; the anti-Jewish one might prompt alarm as a symptom of cultural regression; but ...”

“... more unsavoury amours and making clucking sounds of bourgeois disapproval, he incurred the ire of King Saul. Roth took Bellow’s side, because of course he did. ‘The writers I admired most in the world were conspiring against me,’ Atlas lamented, victim of a classic squeeze play. As a bonus indignity Roth inserted a nasty sideswipe at an Atlas-like ...”

“... not stop bitter enemies in the Party from becoming important regional figures, like Biedenkopf (‘King Kurt’) in Saxony. The SPD has never allowed the same personalisation of authority. When it has been in power, the pattern has always been a diarchy – Brandt and Herbert Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt – with the Chancellor flanked by a powerful and ...”

“... being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into King Lear; presently it was discovered that there were two dead combatants upon the field, each slain by an arrow of the truth, and we tenderly carried off each other’s corpses. Here is a little comedy for Henry James to write!‘This is a fellow novelist’s ...”

“... in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having been named by William O’Shea as co-respondent in a divorce action, and died the following year.) It didn’t even look as though Sinn Féin had captured the public imagination. In opening his tobacco shop ...”

“... to please, was later to refuse to shake Menachem Begin’s hand when he met him in the lift of the King David Hotel. For as long as seemed feasible, he took the part of those Jews who favoured a bi-national state. It could be argued that he adopted this ‘moderate’ line to try and defuse any quarrel between his new English home and a putative Jewish ...”

“... Kremlin Rising, that puts the palliators of the Financial Times to shame.2 Among historians, Richard Pipes, at one with Malia in hostility to Communism, but in temperament and outlook the all but complete opposite, has struck a characteristically dissonant note. Whereas Malia believed it was essentially the First World War that blew Russia off course ...”

“... Jim has got it, but would they flip burgers eight hours a day?’ She used to work for Burger King. ‘We don’t get much diversity round here,’ she said, ‘95 per cent of the children are white and of that probably 60 per cent are blonde.’ ‘Back in the 1980s,’ Harris mused, ‘there was one black person in Fakenham and everybody knew ...”