“... opinion polls. If you are fated to be Osric, then count yourself lucky to toil for a weak and vain king. During the course of his breath-catchingly trite and boring inaugural speech this past January, the President came to a line which reeked of midnight oil. He bore down on it, emphasised it, enunciated it with portent and paused after it for ...”

“... unHomeric orchestration which leaves out the reference to the Greeks’ low morale. In Kings, Christopher Logue’s rewriting of Books One and Two (a kind of sequel to his War Music, 1981, a version of Books Sixteen to Nineteen), the line is rendered: ‘And as it is with soldiers, / Sad as we were a laugh or two went up.’ Two changes stand out, which ...”

“... Herakles came down the Tiber valley with the cattle of Geryon, he was welcomed at the Palatine by King Evander, a Greek from Arcadian Pallantion who had settled his people there. When his mother, a prophetess, foretold the hero’s forthcoming apotheosis, Evander set up the Great Altar (ara maxima) that was the centre of the cult of Hercules throughout the ...”

“... altered. Those who study it seem obsessed, as they always have been, with battles and bureaucracy. Christopher Duffy’s main preoccupation is with the first. There are 41 pages of battle maps, and the minutiae of every engagement Frederick the Great fought are chronicled and analysed in the loving detail familiar from the author’s other books. In what is ...”

“... in England he fell ill and went to take the waters at Bath. There he met his future father-in-law Christopher Nugent, an Irish Catholic with a French medical degree. The waters helped a little but Burke did not fully recover his health until the latter part of 1753, by which time he had completed his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the ...”

“... and so it is. But not in the same way that the screenplay for John Huston’s The Bible is by Christopher Fry, or for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ by Paul Schrader. Pasolini hasn’t really written this movie, he has made excerpts from the gospel and filmed them, either as images in the manner we have just looked at, or with ...”

“... On​ Christmas Day 1788, the king hid his bedclothes under the bed, put a pillowcase on his head and hugged the pillow, which he called Prince Octavius and said had just been born (Prince Octavius had died five years earlier at the age of four). When George realised what day it was and that he had been kept in his straitjacket and not allowed to go to church, he suddenly went under the sofa, saying that he would converse with his saviour there, and that no one was to interrupt them ...”

“... history. In her analysis of Ben Jonson’s later career she reveals how despite becoming one of King James’s most articulate propagandists, he nevertheless retained a margin of critical distance; and by the Caroline era, Jonson’s defence of his own, more populist conception of rural festivity was becoming virtually oppositional in the élitist cultural ...”

“... which confiscated a tenth of the annual value of the property of those who had supported the King. Some Major-Generals were harsher than others. Royalists breathed more easily under Major-General Whalley in the Midlands, where insurrection was held to be relatively unlikely and where Whalley had respectable local connections and was ready to mollify ...”

“... was closer to the sentiments of those who had opposed Charles I in 1641-43 than to those of the King and his supporters. But that did nothing for Cromwell’s reputation; there was still no place for him. He was anathema to Royalists as a republican regicide, and to radical Whigs as a quasi-Royalist. Roundhead sympathisers admired what he had done in the ...”

“... in more detail, than any other individual who held power in the ancient world. Two tracts, To King Helios and To the Mother of the Gods, offer the best insight into his conception of the divine. They are neither as intelligent nor as subtle as Gregory of Nazianzus’ writings on the complexities of the Trinity. Julian presents a rather clumsy pastiche of ...”

“... a draft deferment every bit as opportunist as Clinton’s. He also supported the Martin Luther King movement, and paid generous tribute to it (criticising his own party for its abstention and opposition) in his inaugural address as Speaker. Furthermore, he has admitted to smoking dope, to divorcing his first wife while she was in the recovery room after a ...”

“... to such other collectors as William Lever, William Burrell or Pitt Rivers, Wellcome was the king of ragpickers. ‘Pawn shops, blacksmith shops and rag & bone dealers are amongst the most likely to yield results,’ he told Thompson. ‘The roughest places are often the best – but they require patience. Priests can do much for you.’ He hoarded ...”

“... I’s personal rule in 1640, when financial collapse and military defeat by the Scots drove the king to call the Parliament that would destroy him, and the year of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 (though whereas Trevor-Roper’s narrative went beyond the beginning of the war in August, Adamson’s halts with the ...”

“... Long fragments of his work survive and his tale has often been retold, but rarely as well as by Christopher Kelly here. Full of intrigue and local colour, Priscus reveals among much else the sedentary character of the fifth-century Huns, their distance from their nomadic roots, and the extent to which they had developed a sub-Roman court culture in the ...”