“... of the Sun and the News of the World, who were more familiar with Potter as the‘Dirty Drama King’ and ‘Television’s Mr Filth’. Very few playwrights have had this kind of reach, and none has put it to such dramatic and manipulative use as Dennis Potter in his leavetaking broadcast to the nation. Though Potter was a Methodist, it was a final ...”

“... avant-garde art world Fraser was one of the more worthwhile dealers of his time. According to that king of the métier Leo Castelli, he was ‘a superb dealer’; among leading artists, Richard Hamilton says that ‘Robert’s was the best gallery I knew in London,’ Ellsworth Kelly that ‘he was a very courageous and flamboyant dealer,’ Claes Oldenburg ...”

“... when Mr Phillips remembers going to see a play with his son about another recently unemployed man, King Lear, his response is predictable (the kind of thing you find in Larkin’s letters), but (also like the man in Larkin’s letters) subtle in refusing the available subtleties, and distrustful of them. In retrospect he sees it as one of the longest four ...”

“... especially technical words, regardless of the language. Chaucer, taking over as clerk of the king’s works, was given an inventory of dead stock at the Tower of London that included ‘i ramme cum toto apparatu excepta i drawying corda que frangitur et devastatur, i fryingpanne, i lathe pro officio carpentarii’: a battering-ram with a winding-cord too ...”

“... Archimedes’ death is the one fixed point in his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the ...”

“... warlords. At the height of the 17th-century Time of Troubles, the Kremlin was occupied by a Polish king and supported by a predominantly Polish army. (Imagine an Irish king installed in the Tower of London by an Irish-French army, supported by English Catholics and given diplomatic backing by the Vatican; English national ...”

“... put it pretty high on any list of the characteristics of poetic language. How did metaphor become king of the rhetorical figures? The most obvious answer to that question is ‘because it always has been’. Aristotle said in the Poetics that the ability to create metaphors was ‘a sign of natural gifts, since to use metaphor well is to discern ...”

“... inside and outside the Middle East and Africa as a reason for state weakness. ‘Corruption,’ John Kerry said in May, ‘is as much of an enemy, because it destroys nation-states, as some of the extremists we are fighting.’ This is certainly true in Iraq, where military officers traditionally buy their jobs with the help of a large loan, which they pay ...”

“... of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral cortège. Figures from Paul Mellon to Siegfried Kracauer, Robespierre to Claude Simon, whose cavalry unit was massacred in World War Two, put in ...”

“... warning signs were there early on, when Truss announced that she wanted to accompany the new king on his tour of the four nations of the United Kingdom, although she had only been in office for a matter of days. Someone talked her out of that. Instead, she and Kwarteng spent the next ten days planning for a major shift in government policy at a time when ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...”

“... bought drink for other soldiers. She also paid 20d a day for the training of ‘her’ soldier, John Trahern, who took her place in the Hereford militia. For Jeffreys, the disturbances must at first have seemed remote: London figured primarily in her books as a place of business, and a place to buy whalebone, writing paper and other luxuries. In October ...”

“... court, parliament and the law, and it is strange to have such cultural nationalism ascribed to a king whose ostensible war-aim was to be king of France. Mr Johnson’s nationalism has other unfortunate results. As befits a historian who began his account of English national identity with the heresy of a Welsh monk, Mr ...”

“... mounted under glass, Gehad turned to his colleague Yvona Trnka-Amrhein and the Euripides expert John Gibert, both professors of classics at the University of Colorado Boulder, to decipher the text (it has just been published in the Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik). The papyrus was probably produced in the third century ce at the height of the ...”

“... movies, novels and documentaries. Writers including Robert Penn Warren and Sinclair Lewis (All the King’s Men and It Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character ...”