“... behind the vaguely Scottish Baronial east elevation in Dalhousie Street is the little-known James MacLaren, a gifted Scottish architect who died young. Mackintosh loved castles, and the extraordinary harled irregular south elevation that rises from the building line on steeply sloping ground overlooking the rooftops of Sauchiehall Street might be Fyvie ...”

“... defined the ‘atmosphere in the cab’, they often date badly. The student of elevator scenes in James Bond movies, for example, will discover only that while Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace (2008) instantly unleashes a crisply definitive, neoliberal backwards head-butt, Sean Connery in Diamonds Are Forever (1971) has to absorb a good deal of heavy ...”

“... But they were heard by men trained to understand nothing but the absolute sovereignty of the king-in-Parliament, and for whom ideas of federation or devolution, let alone self-government, were delusory or actively pernicious.Two centuries later, the Kilbrandon Report of 1973 shied away from any sort of federal solution, on the grounds that it worked ...”

“... about Bathsua Makin, a noted 17th-century polyglot, says she was presented at the court of James I because of her ability to ‘speak and write pure Latin, Greek and Hebrew’. ‘But can she spin?’ the king asked. John Gallagher relates this story and many like it in Learning Languages in Early Modern England, in ...”

“... 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 ...”