“... occasion for a formal portrait. We hear of the florid complexions and the addiction to alcohol of John George of Saxony and Christian IV of Denmark, of the ‘mouse-coloured hair’ and shrill voice of the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, of the habitual kneeling and hunting of the Emperor Ferdinand II, of the royal bearing of Gustav Adolf of Sweden, and the ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore ...”

“... seemingly minor events might escalate into large and then cataclysmic ones, as many of us without John Wayne or Rambo’s sense of might-makes-right are now doing. Astrology provided an invaluable tool for periodising history and gauging the relative importance of events. Saturn and Jupiter, the outermost planets known to the 17th century, whose orbits ...”

“... Smith, provost of the Academy and College of Philadelphia; or again, Ralph Izard, Silas Deane and John Adams, who were in the 1770s and 1780s Franklin’s fellow diplomats in Paris. After 1765, Franklin seems to have hated the entire English nation as well. It was too corrupt to be reformed, he wrote in 1780; and in 1781 he concluded that the English had ...”

“... the prompting of the popular press and an anonymous letter to Lord Bute led to a pension from the king in 1762. Too poor to complete his Oxford degree though more learned than his tutor, Johnson, like Richard Savage, his friend and the subject of his first biography, ‘having no profession, became by necessity an author’. Johnson begins his Life of ...”

“... he crosses out the word ‘harness’. Over on this side of the Channel, the native-born author John Braine chooses for his epigraph a snatch of neo-Romantic whimsy from the lyrics of the group Supertramp: Just as long as there’s two of us, just as long as there’s two of us I’ll carry on. Mutatis mutandis, here is the same, rather deprecatory ...”

“... friendly gathering at the stable is crashed by an enigmatic figure, whom Panofsky identified as King Herod but Koerner, citing Lotte Brand Philip, sees as ‘the Jewish Messiah arrived as Antichrist’ already at the Nativity, noting that ‘Christians expected Antichrist to be temporally ubiquitous, circulating through world history.’ That a fiend often ...”

“... Petersburg. Among parvenus from other parts of Europe, few did better, at least for a time, than John Law, son of an Edinburgh banker, who gained an early reputation as a reckless gambler, but also as a brilliant thinker on economic matters. A companion from the gaming tables, the French regent Philippe d’Orléans, brought him to Paris in 1715 to reform ...”

“... In late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, he was the supreme arbiter of literary taste, the ‘king of critics’. He had established a reputation as an editor, reviewer and political journalist by the mid-1870s, before becoming regius professor of rhetoric and English literature at Edinburgh from 1895 to 1915. Yet even in the 1890s, rival critics thought ...”

“... There is only one confirmed case in Delphi’s history of the Pythia being bribed, by the Spartan king Kleomenes, and that isolated incident caused a scandal: as late as the second century CE the travel-writer Pausanias could still maintain that ‘as regards the corruption of the oracle, we know of no one whatsoever, except for Kleomenes, who even attempted ...”

“... their church windows, and cared not a fart for any orders of the Parliament not confirmed by the king. Images were not only objects of belief: they were visible symbols of the unity of communities, and an unsuccessful symbol of unity is a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the ...”

“... A 1984 publication from Lawrence and Wishart, 1939: The Communist Party and the War, edited by John Attfield and Stephen Williams, complements and illuminates the new volume. This is the transcript of a conference held in 1979, in which several Communists of the 1939 generation explained what they thought was going on in their minds at the time. Few ...”

“... speak of, which is more than can be said of the most distinguished of all Crusaders, the sainted King Louis IX of France. Newby is also clear and intelligible on the political context of Saladin’s life, which is no mean achievement, even if, to judge from Lyons and Jackson, he cuts a few corners. He is fair and balanced in his treatment of the ...”

“... doubt. The book ends with the evasive reflection that you cannot blame the conflict on king or kaiser. Instead, a conveniently abstracted and personified Death takes the rap. The novel is unable or unwilling to transcend its protagonist’s restricted outlook on the question of why all this is happening. Willie’s view is not restricted because he ...”

“... of Pinocchio, Joe McCarthy; instead of Uncle Remus, tales of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King.’ Even Alexander Portnoy is a trusted aide to New York City’s liberal mayor John Lindsay, a tribune of the Great Society. In the thick of his erotic adventures, he can’t help remembering how he spent his childhood ...”