“... and nobody was grave-faced about it. His most memorable poems are fanciful squibs like ‘The King of the Crocodiles’ that hover on the brink of inspired nonsense. When the war was over and a wave of political protests began – really a resumption of the protests of the 1790s – Southey took an indecently hard line on restricting the freedom of the ...”

“... opposition, an elegant William Pitt rides the shoulders of the bloated-looking, nonsense-spouting King. John Bull, objecting to war with Revolutionary France in the 1798 ‘TREASON!!!’, farts into the unmistakably unhappy face of His Royal Highness. Like other caricaturists in the orbit of the French Revolution, Newton made scatology a subversive ...”

“... still a strong psychological barrier against its conversion into political opposition. The ‘good king, bad advisers’ idea retained a surprising currency. This view is broadly confirmed by Marifeli Pérez-Stable, who, in The Cuban Revolution, concludes that the Cuban Government retained an undetermined level of popular support. For many citizens, breaking ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Spanish settlement: Oñate, the son of a mining magnate in New Spain, was chosen by a viceroy of King Philip II to expand Spanish territory north into the Pueblo peoples’ region.The Spanish invaders often demanded goods be handed over without compensation, and when Acoma Pueblo, far to the west of Santa Fe, refused, and some Spaniards were killed in the ...”

“... 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 ...”