“... king, moves to the centre of the story. If Saul is the model for Macbeth, David is the model for Henry V. The contrast between the two is cruelly conveyed in the little taunt which the women, prime movers throughout the story, start to sing in 1 Samuel 18: ‘Saul has struck down his thousands/and David his tens of thousands!’ This is Alter’s translation ...”

“... had learnt in the 13th century. The first European ruler to react to this change of location was Henry IV, who in 1400 wrote a letter to the ‘King of Abyssinia, Prester John’. The fascination with Ethiopia did not stop there, for news broke, in 1441, that an Ethiopian delegation was to attend that year’s Council of Florence. The Pope was reportedly ...”

“... ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century, J.S. Mill in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell this century. Nominated MP ...”

“... popularisation of the subject of social history has recently come back into favour; and earlier, Henry Sumner Maine and F.W. Maitland made historical jurisprudence reputable subjects. More elusive is the question that lurks behind the immediate human interest of the lives of the Apostles. Given that most societies recruit élites for a variety of purposes ...”

“... rather rare comments on Shakespeare’s language. He might say of a particular passage, like Henry V’s soliloquy about the cares of kingship, that it is ‘terribly bad poetry’, but he doesn’t say anything more, except that this ‘is just as it should be’. He would read aloud long passages and pass on without recorded comment. The effect is a ...”

“... The​ official justification for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was set out by Henry Stimson, the former US secretary of war, in the February 1947 issue of Harper’s. There had been ‘no other choice’, he said. Had the bombs not been dropped, a bloody invasion of Japan would have been inevitable, and might have ‘cost over a million casualties to the American forces alone ...”

“... but the victorious soldiers had been roused. Generals such as Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law Henry Ireton combined a Bible-grounded vengeance against Charles as a ‘man of blood’ with the more practical realisation that a stricken king would always try to win back power. Negotiations, they thought, had to stop. Claiming necessity and the ‘safety of ...”

“... of automata in this theology can be seen in the post-Reformation treatment of the Rood of Grace. Henry VIII banned automata from England’s churches as part of the creation of the Anglican Church, and the Rood was taken from Boxley Abbey in 1538 at the time of the monastery’s dissolution. The removal was carried out by Geoffrey Chamber, an agent of Thomas ...”

“... action is harder to fathom, especially in the more autonomous societies of the British Atlantic. James Walvin’s new book takes a different approach. In an effort to get away from the ‘big meta-narrative’, Walvin presents biographical sketches of three participants in Britain’s 18th-century slave economy. John Newton (1725-1807) was a slave captain ...”

“... landscapes of Rubens (including their bovine staffage, which no one else has had any use for) was James Ward. The Tate exhibition of Ward’s Gordale Scar with the whole range of studies and drawings for that picture (unluckily, too close to megalomania to be taken seriously as the masterpiece which, as a painterly performance, it undoubtedly was) revealed ...”

“... Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable as these ...”

“... the moment at which Continental demonology was brought to Scotland: it was in 1590, when James VI returned from Denmark with his bride. It is possible, since an arranged marriage is likely to be more traumatic for a homosexual than it is for most of us, that this moment also pinpoints a major attack of sexual guilt in ...”

“... One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence ...”

“... partly because he did so little to promote himself. Before he took over the Dial, he wrote James Joyce a cheque for $700; it came to Joyce from his publisher with a note that read: ‘Please don’t imagine that America is full of rich young men of that kind!’ Thayer wasn’t modest, but he was discreet, especially compared to the most prominent New ...”

“... on Banbury Road in Oxford, said to have been installed by the Royal Mail to ease the labours of James Murray at the helm of the Oxford English Dictionary. With a magnificent incuriosity, I never thought to wonder at the strangeness of a post box positioned to enable a dictionary – it was simply where I deposited weekly letters to my friend Marian, who ...”