“... Two; Assassins about American power and its discontents; Show Boat about race relations; and The King and I about imperialism. Unfortunately, his focus on the American theme means that he avoids musicals that have almost nothing to say about America: My Fair Lady, The Lion King (which trumped the aggressively American ...”

“... past the difference between being titled and being entitled. When Kermode accepted the post of King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, he felt he had ‘become a sort of nobody, yet a nobody with a title, with a carnival crown’. A knighthood is not a carnival crown, but the drift of this glancing and complicated book is that no ...”

“... Lodge and Tom Sharpe. But in any wider competition for the post of English humorist-in-residence, Michael Frayn would surely be a prime contender. Now verging on sixty, his collected plays and translations fill three thick volumes, his early newspaper columns for the Guardian and the Observer have been reprinted, and he is well launched into the second phase ...”

“... in 1995. Mossbourne’s first head, or ‘principal’ as they are often called in academies, was Michael Wilshaw, who subsequently became chief inspector at Ofsted.Both City and Mossbourne began with a single cohort of Year 7s (11 and 12-year-olds) before building up to a full school and sixth form after seven years, which gave their heads time to decide how ...”

“... version of Frankenstein’s monster, at others like the whole beach invading the city as a grainy King Kong. Nor is it clear why the film needs another villain, in the shape of an ambitious photographer exposed as a plagiarist by Peter, and now keen to see Peter dead. He gets transformed by a bit of the black stuff too, although it’s hard to see what ...”

“... prototype. While modern French scholarship busies itself with probing the dreams of the poem’s king in order to uncover a ‘feudal libido’, can we recapture the dreams that troubled the original Charlemagne (a light sleeper, as it happens)? Already in the Early Medieval period people were in the business of making images for themselves and investing ...”

“... to his presence – and even then, only after he had first seen the envoys of some petty barbarian king. As is so often the way of ancient history, the richest evidence documents an event of little intrinsic significance: the mission of Maximinus and Priscus served only to authorise future embassies with ambassadors more to Attila’s taste. But in 450 ...”

“... them either, and yet they are right in thinking that childhood reminiscences make seductive books. Michael Schmidt was brought up in Mexico, and in his ‘not strictly autobiographical novel’, The Colonist, he turns with brilliant and painful concentration to his early years. No doubt he was in search of himself, and the making of what he now is – a ...”

“... to facilitate a Spanish invasion of England – caused James major political difficulties, but the King remained loyal to him. On the eve of his death in 1625, James recommended Huntly to his son Charles as ‘the most faithful servant that ever served a prince’. The summer of 1587 also saw the visit to Scotland of Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du ...”

“... January 1789, when it caused a sensation. When one reads it now, in this excellent new edition by Michael Sonenscher, where it appears for the first time in English alongside the other pamphlets Sieyès wrote in 1788, it is still easy to see why. It is not a beautiful or polished piece of writing, it is poorly organised and it is probably too long for what it ...”

“... In March​ 1968, only a few days before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr visited Long Beach, a suburb of New York City, at the invitation of a local NAACP leader. Like many suburbs at that time, Long Beach was effectively a segregated community, with an African American population living in a tiny ghetto and working in the homes of local white families ...”

“... the replacement of Squire Allworthy by Mr Bounderby. In this interesting and original book, Michael Miller suggests that they may have ordered these things better in France. His subject is the history of the greatest of the 19th-century Paris department stores, the Bon Marché, from its creation until the 1914 War. In his conclusion, however, he ...”

“... With his capacity for self-dramatisation, he came to see her as his Antigone, following the old king into exile. She became an example of one of her own analytical inventions: her character ordered by the same logic of ‘altruistic surrender’ which she observed in nannies who replace wishes for themselves – for children, for a sexual life of their own ...”

“... among the trees, perched on an improbable cart waving a giant tooth above it. It belongs to Dr King Schultz, a German dentist turned bounty hunter, who wants to buy one of the slaves to help him identify felons. The actor is Christoph Waltz, who was so impeccably, horridly charming as a Nazi officer in Inglourious Basterds; here, as a whimsical ...”

“... Friedrich was lucky enough, via intermediaries, to sell on occasion to royal houses – the king of Prussia, the tsar – but never reliably enough to establish a taste for his work. When there was a sinecure in Dresden going (a professorship in landscape painting), Friedrich was found a smaller one. Many of his encounters with the public or with ...”