“... usually the case, the instigator of this accusation was a converted Jew, Nicholas Donin. The only king who answered the Pope’s call was the pious Louis IX of France, later canonised, whose views on the Jewish question were thought to be admirably forthright: the best way to carry on a disputation with a Jew, he said, was to plunge a sword into him. Louis ...”

“... he considered priest-ridden and decadent, and for its spectacularly dysfunctional ruling family (King Carlos IV was mentally unstable; real power lay with the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his ...”

“... hearing Les Sylphides). One of the outstanding pieces in this group is the kneeling figure of the king, 26 cm high (cat. 37), a superb example of how Twelfth-Dynasty sculpture conveys a sense of man in the face of the awesomeness of death. The other is the headless figure of a queen, robed, standing with one leg advanced, height 70 cm (cat. 35), in which the ...”

“... high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement a cautionary tale for other writers, as Hilton Als insisted, or one ...”

“... destroy them as a political force in the process. Up went tuition fees, and out went Nick Clegg. David Cameron was the salesman, Clegg was the punch-bag, but Osborne was the one pulling the strings. Whenever he became the focus of attention, as he did after his ‘omnishambles’ budget in 2012, his lack of presentational skills came close to being his ...”

“... in favour of the ‘miracle of peace’ which, to our acclaim, Arafat, Rabin, Shimon Peres and now King Hussein are supposedly bringing about. What hope, anyway, did these Palestinians ever have of recovering homes they left almost half a century ago? Israeli historians like Benny Morris, Israeli authors like David Grossman ...”

“... with a chairman who accused me of being a disciple of Sorel, a writer of whom I had barely heard. (David Caute sardonically notes that ‘the allusion to Sorel was standard nonsense among professors of history and politics hostile to the New Left: one may search in vain for any favourable reference to Sorel in New Left ideology.’) I had also been National ...”

“... Last year​ – year one of the Great War centenary – David Jones’s In Parenthesis, a long prose-and-verse evocation of his first months as a soldier, got a decent outing. The poet Owen Sheers drew on the text for his play Mametz at National Theatre Wales in the summer; Faber reissued the book with T.S. Eliot’s introduction in its series Poets of the Great War; and in Poetry of the First World War (2013), Tim Kendall chose a fine sequence of extracts – sticking to the verse where he could – even though he reckoned that Jones is ‘by far the most difficult [poet] to anthologise ...”

“... father and Coburg grandfather, where he joined a duelling fraternity, mixed with officers of the King’s Hussars stationed in the town, and found himself surrounded by flatterers. He also imbibed the German-nationalist message of the historian Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, which bolstered his already well-developed sense of Hohen-zollern destiny. As he approached ...”

“... observations, so when you arrive at Fra Angelico’s sweetly decorative manuscript illustration of King David you notice that the gesture of the hand must be the result of someone’s careful observation of what a bent wrist and separated fingers can be made to say and how a foot can be made to rest firmly on the ground. It is dated c.1430 – one can ...”

“... he appears before me, I could not stop myself kissing him.’ Unlike his tight-fisted father, King John, Henry was generous to a fault, showering all around him with precious rings, brooches, luxurious robes, huge consignments of firewood and deer from his forests. The gifts he received from others he regifted, also on a heroic scale. When he ran out of ...”

“... The crucial moment is when Deirdre, who has rejected a future of wealth and position with an old king in favour of true love with a young warrior, angrily overhears her lover’s prediction that when she is old he will cease to love her – a circumstance which leads to his death at the hands of the man she has deserted and her suicide. Despite Deirdre’s ...”

“... but overdue crackdown on racketeers. Both Lansky and Trafficante, the Tampa-based numbers king who became the second most important crime figure in Havana, were prosecuted. Both got off lightly, but their businesses were damaged; suddenly, they needed a new venue. Havana beckoned, indeed it rolled out the red carpet, with Cuban officials making Lansky ...”

“... and prestige, rather than new loves or old, the character of The Leopard’s originator emerges in David Gilmour’s entertaining and astute biography. There is at times, but only at times, an excess of reserve – caught from his subject’s own fastidiousness? In the brief, lyrical memoir Lampedusa wrote in 1955, he invoked with unequivocal passion the ...”

“... a few months as minister of the interior and was expecting promotion to the top post when the King, inexplicably for Fraga, appointed Suarez instead. At the 1977 election Suarez’s party won 165 seats and Fraga’s Alianza Popular only 16, a disparity which at the subsequent election was even greater. But before the 1982 contest the UCD dismissed Suarez ...”