“... 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 ...”

“... in Polaroids from the Dead (1996), Coupland writes about the day in 1970 he saw a reproduction of James Rosenquist’s F-111 in the school encyclopedia. ‘Warhol said that once you saw the world as Pop, you could never look at it the same way ever again. Absolutely true. Early family memory: young Douglas cutting up Life magazines bought for 25 cents apiece ...”

“... decades later: ‘I own myself indebted to Sir William Temple for recommending me to the late King, although without success, and for his choice of me to take care of his posthumous writings.’ So what about ‘Stella’: Esther Johnson, a girl of eight when Swift first met her in Temple’s household in 1689, thought by credible witnesses to be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have to be junked if it were to be made good. With some obviously difficult writers – Henry James, say, or Geoffrey Hill – one has the sense that a tangled world is being masterfully comprehended. With Paterson (as with Browning, the shadowy double who haunts this volume), it seems rather that simplicity is always just beyond him, whether in Scots, or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many readers accepted would do for the time being. In what my headmaster used to call the interim period, self-help books have taken over the world, which is fast becoming a place where no one is safe from the threat of their own ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and effects. Back in 1976, punk set itself against disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July ...”

“... Dr Rabelais thinks of real men in real wars, a ‘tyrant’ such as Charles V, who ransomed the King of France, is condemned and the once-comic figures who egged Picrochole on are treated as ‘seditious’ (a sin as well as a crime) and made to toil in the printing-presses; the wounded are nursed back to health. Rabelais came to see joyful laughter as a ...”