“... the place her pain is centred, the place where metaphors converge. She calls Jesus ‘the powerful King of Hearts’. Hélène Cixous has pointed out that the heart is the place where male and female metaphors become one. Both sexes agree it is there that love is bred and contained. The heart beats faster when you see your lover, or in the sexual act. It is ...”

“... sat there and smoked, but, when I sat on the lavatory, and put my legs up on the stool, I was a king, King Canute, or a great prince, though also a bard. The stories I told myself were of tournaments, and of knightly encounters in which the combatants were represented by the tassels at either end of my dressing-gown ...”

“... Robin Hood legend: a country where the symbol of the nation’s best interests, in the form of the king, is far away, and in his absence, a rootless elite that has no concept of duty or service except to itself is busy taxing the poor. It is as if national boundaries are for the little people, the global peasantry who pay their taxes, not for great men and the ...”

“... prose which rises to ranting verse (‘long-stored lightnings loosed/Yesterday ‘gainst some King’). It contrasts the fate of an unlucky, executed groom with that of his more fortunate surviving Prince: and so doing, perhaps hints at a great literary source whose shadow lies behind the difficult opening of the story. Why did Kipling set his tale in ...”

“... in Proust. Sex? A Dance gives full measure to the place of desire in human life. Powell credited James with ‘forcing, almost single-handed, the English novel into the status of a work of art’, but remarked that there he fell short; even The Golden Bowl was limited by a ‘chronically inadequate understanding of sexual passion as an element in human ...”

“... a brilliant collection of short (and sometimes not so short) fictions, which remains, in its King Penguin edition, the most beautifully designed of his many beautifully designed books; and 1982, Janine, apparently Gray’s favourite among his own novels, and mine too. Janine is intimate rather than epic: it is written as an interior monologue, and this ...”

“... whale is a ‘tyrant’ who falls victim to the plots of little fishes, and finally a ‘slain king’ whose death goes unrevenged. In these respects he could be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have ...”

“... 12th century, on a church with its ‘boxes of gold and silver full of dead men’s bones’. A king might want to melt down that gold to pay soldiers. The wonder-seeking faithful prized the stuff inside: namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead ...”

“... Hogarth’, exemplified in particular in a critique of his work by the Irish painter and critic James Barry. Acknowledging Hogarth’s merit – his ‘admirable fund of invention’, the moral quality of his satire, ‘seldom or never employed in a dishonest or unmanly way’ – Barry had nevertheless claimed that his ‘general aim’ was not to ‘reach ...”

“... Cindy Crawford, Kate Moss. The controversial 2008 cover of the basketball player LeBron James clutching Gisele Bündchen, which for many at the time called to mind King Kong, was nowhere in sight. That Vogue has been disappeared. That Vogue, at least, is ...”

“... such as ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, ‘Alas, Poor Richard’ and ‘Many Thousands Gone’, James Baldwin rejected the role of ‘Negro writer’ and ‘categorisation’ more generally; Irving Howe defended Wright in ‘Black Boys and Native Sons’; then Ellison, caught in the crossfire as the author of Invisible Man, shot back at Howe in ‘The World ...”

“... slaving expanded significantly during the 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new king, Charles II, and his brother, the future James II. In 1665, it was James’s eagerness to capture Dutch slave-trading forts on the West African coast that set off the second Anglo-Dutch ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... end it was only the close alliance of two non-Tories, Attlee and Hitler, who made a PM of WSC; the King, as well as most Tories, wanted Halifax, who indeed would have been PM in 1940 had he wanted the job – as Lord Blake trenchantly reaffirms in his contribution (‘How Churchill became prime minister’). There but for the grace of Lord Halifax, Churchill ...”

“... We find in Appleyard’s index as well as his text, a character called ‘Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Spain’. Alas, no drawing of a Seville orange, and, in the index, no unescorted Isabella either. Enough. Isabella does remind us how apt is the subtitle ‘Science and the Soul of Modern Man’. Aside from George Eliot, the only females to get ...”