“... College, the site of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word ...”

“... agonising over his situation so much as living out a key scene from Mr Smith Goes to Washington: James Stewart’s character alternately represented his ‘naive’ opponents Voorhis and McGovern, and his own idealistic self. Nixon’s most dreamlike performance came four days before Christmas 1970, when Elvis Presley (who’d written the president a ...”

“... inhabitants of that same country, and not only in England. Across the Channel they wondered why a king should choose to marry his mistress. (The whole point is, however, that Anne never was Henry’s mistress, whereas her sister Mary was. When Henry was accused of having slept not only with Anne’s sister but with her mother, he disarmingly ...”

“... if sedition were being brewed on their premises. This was a significant threat: shortly after the king backed down from his banning order, several proprietors were arrested for continuing to permit ‘seditious discourses, and spreading false and seditious news’. Until the end of Charles II’s reign, and beyond, London’s coffee houses continued to be ...”

“... as part of the celebrations of Caesar’s triumph in 46 BC. In modern French culture, as Anthony King has emphasised (in a recent supplement to the Journal of Roman Archaeology), Vercingetorix has become a national hero for both Left and Right. In World War Two, for example, he did double duty as ‘the first resistance fighter in our history’ and as a ...”

“... the best he could find, including Kenny Everett and Steve Wright in the UK, and Howard Stern, king of the shock-jocks, in the US. All three were wacky, eccentric rule-breakers, and in the case of Everett and Stern risqué by the standards of their contemporaries. But Moyles saw that this wasn’t what made them so successful. Their secret was their ...”

“... the moon. No one in Eastern Europe thought we did. They thought it was just Cold War bullshit.’ James Earl Ray, killer of Martin Luther King Jr, obviously had help from the establishment, as did John Wilkes Booth, who did away with Lincoln. As Finn says, not everyone believes that Booth was really gunned down eleven days ...”

“... facing certain death – watching their comrades sail away, yet bravely cheering ‘God Bless the King!’ It’s no surprise that The Wager is being made into a film by Martin Scorsese: it already reads like one (Killers of the Flower Moon is based on an earlier book by Grann).These impressive effects rely on some writerly liberties. The demands of the ...”

“... decision to come out publicly as a lesbian. She returned to New York shortly before Martin Luther King was assassinated and began teaching in public schools and colleges. In 1969 Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York demanded that public colleges change their admissions procedures to ensure that student intake reflected the racial ...”

“... into his mad message.Since 2005 the Oratory has been in the charge of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a group of guys who are probably as normal as they sound. Still, no matter how often you tell yourself, as the celebrant opens his mouth, that you are in for the ideological ride of a lifetime, you are never really prepared. I have heard my ...”

“... Among the new recruits, he recalled, there was a strong feeling that people ‘like the deposed King and Mrs Simpson’ had deceived the public about Nazism, encouraging them to see it as a bulwark against Bolshevism and depicting the greatest evil as another war with Germany. This naturally led to a counter, pro-Russian feeling, which has since been ...”

“... as a follower first of the earls of Ulster and then of the earls of Chester, and finally of the King. He was a royalist captain I215-16 and rewarded by John with lands. Under Henry III he continued to prosper and became a baron. His son James (c.1220-77) was a royalist too in the Barons’ Wars and became Justiciar of ...”

“... and moderate? Master and slave? Dictator and compliant intellectual? (This was how C.L.R. James saw them in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, written during his detention on Ellis Island in 1952 and republished last year.) Or are they merely chalk and cheese? Would the debates of the 1930s and 1940s, which cast Ahab as a Hitler or a Stalin and ...”

“... and so is Browning’ – expresses a view shared by admirers such as George Eliot and Henry James, doubters like Carlyle and Hopkins, and a chorus of others. But the history of poetry is a history of revolutions in what counts as poetry. Today, Browning’s density, his chattiness, his specificity, his preference for dramatic and narrative forms, even ...”

“... Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered to him is rarely clear, as by his own account it seems to have no particular influence on the ...”