“... over the past century, but that era is now at an end. No single actor – not even the king of Saudi Arabia – is today powerful enough to exert the kind of control once enforced by the Oklahoma governor. Oil – the compacted remains of prehistoric life – has always oozed to ground level, and people have always found something to do with ...”

“... to have its closest affinities with recent cinematic exports such as Jane Campion’s Sweetie and John Ruane’s Death in Brunswick. (Particularly the latter, since in this novel Carey has made a brave and largely successful attempt to reflect the diversity of Australia’s immigrant culture, with all its attendant conflicts and resentments.) The Catchprices ...”

“... who purchased 13-year-old girls for £5 in order to expose alleged wrong-doing (London, 1885 – John Pilger was using the same technique for the Daily Mirror in 1982); barons who lived on giant soundproof yachts (Pulitzer in 1907, Scripps in the 1920s); barons who helped start wars and stirred up riots; barons who drank a gallon of whisky every day and beat ...”

“... in his stepson Magas as military governor; in 275 Magas rebelled, and ruled as the self-appointed king of Cyrenaica from 275 to 250. We well may wonder how such a démarche affected Callimachus. A citizen of Cyrene with a government-sponsored job in Ptolemaic Egypt clearly had to watch his step, and not solely on account of intermittent hostilities. His ...”

“... to see the painting: the Dorias refused to allow him in.In 1939, the prince wrote to his cousin King Victor Emmanuel III to warn him that Mussolini’s decision to go to war against Britain was a mistake. The king passed the letter on to Mussolini, who forced Doria to leave the city. He found his way back, however, and ...”

“... detest what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ Actually, as John Durham Peters points out in Courting the Abyss, there is no evidence that Voltaire ever said any such thing. An English writer, Beatrice Hall, writing under a male pseudonym in 1906, suggested that Voltaire’s attitude to the burning of a book written by ...”

“... about. Yesterday’s bourgeois media correspondent becomes today’s revolutionary press officer. John Reed was not the first or the last journalist to follow this trajectory. But he remains the most spectacular. He went to report Russia after the February Revolution in 1917, made straight for the Petrograd Bolsheviks and became a denizen of the seething ...”

“... its leaders asked Petty and Christopher Wren ‘to consider the philosophy of shipping’, and the king himself urged Petty to turn his mind to naval matters. The mix of science and statecraft was compelling: Petty got down to work straight away. He wrote to the king, saying that ‘there was no greater, no more stately ...”

“... of Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer has the Wife declare that her tale is set long ago, in the days of King Arthur. Back then the land was ‘fulfild of fayerye’, and the elf queen danced with her company in the green meadows. But that’s all over now. The elves and fairies have been driven out by the friars, who have blanketed the country with prayers and ...”

“... that Albania didn’t really have one.In the postwar years, Albania became more royal than the king. It broke with the Soviet Union after Khrushchev tried to shut down the Stalin cult in 1956. It broke with China in the late 1970s when Hoxha sensed Beijing was cosying up to the West (Mao, Hoxha decided, had been playing a Marxist-Leninist when in fact he ...”

“... they got on with one another, perhaps because little was required of them beyond loyalty to the king and grand duke. The commonwealth’s boundaries were fluid; its constitution (kings elected by acclamation, parliament subject to the veto of a single member) was a controlled chaos. To its swarming nobility, it felt like a sort of democracy – ‘golden ...”

“... book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King and Brian Patten and Maureen Duffy. His sleep must have been poisoned for years by worries about properly dating Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man. It is, in fact, a disaster to fill a book like this with storms of names and endless lists; narrative gets ...”

“... in part, and it is satisfactorily gruesome: ‘What a bed! An immense slab, nine by nine, a double king size, it has a mortuary headboard of black quilted Naugahide, with a built-in plastic back angle and retractable armrests of speckled metal.’ Because Elvis ‘detests everything antique with the heartfelt disgust of a real forward-looking American of his ...”

“... aim for some was the defeat of the Mufti; for many others, the chief objective was to prevent King Abdullah from incorporating the Arab areas of Palestine into Transjordan. The idea of a co-ordinated attack by five Arab armies – Goliath and his hordes against little David – is fatuous. When Israel attacked Egyptian forces in September 1948, Abdullah ...”

“... people had not the faintest idea of this side of their own historic past, all lost in a jumble of King Arthur and Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, strongly Scandinavian though his vocabulary is, had only the ‘Brutus legend’ to guide him to his own history; four centuries later, Dr Johnson was little better ...”