“... religious relic. (For years it was the only pre-1930 Hollywood movie – save Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings – regularly shown on American commercial television.) As such, it opens on a mournful note. To the accompaniment of a plaintive pseudo-semitic melody, a series of intertitles identifies the Jews as ‘a race older than civilisation’ whose ...”

“... Marchamont Nedham at their head. In 1656 it yielded Nedham’s The Excellency of a Free State and James Harrington’s Oceana. The leading works produced by the second period were Henry Neville’s Plato Redivivus and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses concerning Government. Collectively, these writers are normally described as ‘republicans’. Skinner ...”

“... with one occasional diarist, setting out from the memorial to Harold II, the last Anglo-Saxon king, sited where the high altar of Waltham Abbey once stood, for a five-day tramp to another heritage marker at Battle Abbey. And on, strength permitting, to the marble effigy of the slaughtered English warrior who is cradled, in serpentine embrace, by his lover ...”

“... stood, queens, princes, heathen courtiers, and in some dark pocket at the outer edge the future king of England lowered his eyes to shake the hand of Robert Mugabe. We live in cultish times – not to say, occultist ones – in which it seems not unreasonable for people, en masse, to weep in the streets for public figures they previously cared little ...”

“... Villa Reale every night, I have generally two princes, two or 3 nobles, the English minister & the King, with a crowd beyond us.’ But Naples had its drawbacks, and she added endearingly: ‘But Greville, flees, & lice their is millions.’ She learned Italian, and with her fine voice and her dramatic abilities – her tableaux or ‘classical ...”

“... a political right. The experience of military rule in the 1650s persuaded most Englishmen that a king who had his own army would be able to impose taxes without Parliamentary consent. If the people were to be free, the sovereign must be disarmed. But the nation must be able to defend itself against invaders, so a volunteer army made up of county militias ...”

“... issued under the Great Seal allowing him to seize pirates too, and an even more unusual grant from King William stating that the Adventure Galley and her owners could keep everything she took – no tedious Vice-Admiralty courts and sharing of the spoils, nothing to be given back to the original owners. With these papers and a vessel that gauged 287 ...”

“... man’s damnation: Up the Rebels, To Hell with the Pope, And God Save – as you prefer – the King or Ireland However, one of the most important reclamations of recent years is the group of translations, by Thomas Kinsella, of poems assembled by Sean O Tuama, and brought out in a dual-language anthology called An Duanaire 1600-1900: Poems of the ...”

“... back to the Declaration of Arbroath in 1320, which held that there was a contract between the king and the people. As it was the Union of Scotland and England in 1707 (a consensual union brought about by treaty, not conquest) that brought Great Britain and its Parliament into being, perhaps we should recognise this historical event as a foundation of the ...”

“... solve the murder) or dramatic (characters change one another through their interactions). A James Bond film is almost all procedural; Pride and Prejudice is mostly dramatic. Hamlet mixes the two. D&D and most of its offspring focus on the procedural; Masks stands out for the ways in which its rules encourage dramatic play instead. Where D&D characters ...”

“... source-hunting and explorations of Eliot’s use of Grail mythology or Wagner or the Fisher King of the kind one finds in Cleanth Brooks’s 1939 study of The Waste Land. ‘T.S. Eliot and Obsessional Neurosis’, Jarrell planned to call it, and one can surmise the argument he intended to make from the paragraph he devotes to Eliot in a lecture of 1962 ...”

“... Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker’s ethereal blonde girlfriend, who would haunt him as Kim Novak haunts James Stewart in Vertigo; The Unmasking of Green Goblins 1, 2, and 3 (a shock each time); The Marriage of Aunt May to Doctor Octopus (an odious villain) – were well behind him. And Peter Parker had settled for what seemed to us a second-best girlfriend, the ...”

“... chiefs of staff took very different approaches to the role of counsellor. Timothy, the philosopher-king of blue-collar Conservatism, hoped to reposition the Tories as a statist national party working in the interests of all classes, not just the fortunate haves. Hill was more intuitive and less wordy. But on one thing they concurred: the role of favourite ...”

“... In the early 1860s, Bradley and her widowed mother joined the household of Emma and her husband, James Cooper. Edith, the Coopers’ daughter, had been born in 1862; three years later, following the birth of another girl, Emma withdrew into a shadowy life of invalidism. The 18-year-old Bradley – strong, confident and hungry for responsibility – took care ...”

“... porter on account of his manager’s racism. In 2016, he is working in the Light Café near King’s Cross, a whitewashed former warehouse with exposed architectural features and a moneyed clientele. These passages are rendered in scrupulous detail. Here is Jesse standing before the espresso machine, a description that couldn’t be more numbingly ...”