“... Monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and now has, in English, an almost entirely new oeuvre to the one James Wood wrote about here soon after he died (and I wrote about in the TLS).* For a dead foreign writer to be allowed to carry on in this way is, to say the least, rather unusual. At that time, Wood wrote about a great comic writer, and I about a man whose best ...”

“... in the Scots English into which it was translated, presumably at Holyrood, for the benefit of James VI’s learned tutor (‘gif my esteat did weill suffer it I haif nocht bene without desire to see you, and kiss the hand of the young king, in quhome mony haue layd thair hoipes’ etc). Sidney’s correspondence with ...”

“... absent: she also had a habit of physically vanishing. Another of the boyfriends would be King Farouk of Egypt, whom she met while working as a cipher clerk in Cairo in 1944. He liked to flog her with his dressing-gown cord on the steps of his palace. She was dangerously beautiful – the danger being for herself as much as for others. The ‘romantic ...”

“... and imprisoned leaders of reform societies and printers of the radical press. ‘Church and King’ was the watchword of magistrates and manufacturers, who employed spies to root out any evidence of radical sympathies. After 1815 a new generation of local activists began to campaign alongside veterans of the earlier struggle. Reform societies organised ...”

“... about whether he’d have to walk backwards down the steps after receiving his prize from the King of Sweden (about which he was seriously nervous); he traded bonhomous badinage with girlfriends from the distant past; he cheerfully sent the photographs and supplied the autographs; he commended the amateur physicists for their bold ...”

“... both Indigenous and African’. He describes the period from the Pequot War of 1637 to King Philip’s War of 1675-78 as a 17th-century version of a ‘regional total war, a struggle to determine whether the Puritan Israel or various Native homelands would survive at all’. Both conflicts resulted in the capture and sale of Native people. There ...”

“... child self reading ‘The Tree of Justice’ in Rewards and Fairies, the old madman brought before King William by Rahere the Jester revealed as Harold Godwin, and Hugh, the Saxon knight, kneeling to him. And ‘each time,’ writes Inglis, ‘the queer, crisp ripple of excitement tingled along my spine; the brimming tears which never quite fell, the chokey ...”

“... house.’ The extensive rioting and looting that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, although ostensibly a spontaneous expression of outrage, in some areas quickly lost its focus. One youth, asked why he was rioting, is reported to have said: ‘Because what’s-his-name was killed.’ Another rioter shouted that it was ‘early Easter ...”

“... most of the colonists, couldn’t see it, but to the ingenious theologians, anxious to serve their king and their Church, it seemed providential, precise and even practical. To Bartolomé de Las Casas, however, another Dominican, later Protector of the Indians and Bishop of Chiapa in Yucatan, the line was too fine. ‘False testimony, a contrived argument for ...”

“... foundations of success in popular music, what Hollywood was to films. Benny Goodman became the ‘King of Swing’ not only because Hammond talked this gifted man, then a disenchanted studio musician, into forming a band; Goodman took on a top-class black ex-bandleader as his arranger, devised a jazz sound rather than playing routine commercial dance-music ...”

“... general public, through the South London hospital named for him. Maudsley is something of a demon king arriving on the scene, after his well-meaning predecessors. He became a dominant figure in medical psychology, but was disliked for his bleakly nihilistic view of the causes and care of insanity, as well as for his personal prickliness. He prided himself on ...”

“... the Department of English at Princeton, traces the Western’s obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on ...”

“... in one or more demonstrations in the theatre at Dumfries in favour of the French and against King George – must be substantially true or Burns would not have had so much trouble apologising for it to his seniors in the Excise. While not taking Burns’s politics seriously, McIntyre judges them on grids provided by notional two-party ...”

“... usual swirls before pine’ – which White himself, in The Burning Library, traces to a poem by James Merrill. And the narrator of the novel has had jobs and written books identical to White’s own. As I have suggested, White is particularly interesting on the novel’s analogue to Forgetting Elena, but he also makes mild jokes about all the doubles of his ...”

“... Lord George Macartney, arriving on a trade mission and bearing gifts for the Emperor Qianlong from King George III (1793), was so impressed by the strong, diligent stevedores, ‘singing and roaring all the while’, and the healthy and agile women (who had plainly ‘not been crippled in the usual manner’: this was in the north of the country) that he could ...”