“... place in church because it put her next to someone with ‘a strong breath’. The chaplain to James I’s wife, Queen Anne, held that of ‘all the noisome scents, there is none so rammish and so intolerable as that which proceeds from man’s body … I will not speak of his filth issuing from his eares, his eyes, nostrils, mouth, navel, and the uncleane ...”

“... speaking, Arnold is not an allusive filmmaker. But it’s hard not to recall the scene from James Whale’s classic Frankenstein (1931) in which the monster pitches a rather similar blonde innocent into a lake and leaves her to drown. Keira survives, even though Mia, like the monster, can’t swim. The film’s moral undertow has on this occasion forced ...”

“... Levinson printed 350,000 copies of the pamphlet, helping to fire up public and elite opinion. James T. Shotwell, a historian at Columbia, more conventionally targeted only ‘aggressive war’, defined as force used after (and in spite of) mandatory arbitration and judgment from the Permanent Court of International Justice. This definition led to a ...”

“... whole Church. Towns, children, parishes and days of the year were named for them. Even as late as Henry V the Battle of Agincourt was remembered as St Crispin’s day, after an obscure patron of cobblers and tanners, and Oxford still has its Hilary Term. Commemorated on 14 January, Hilary of Poitiers was a distinguished theologian, but the Legend takes more ...”

“... property and offices down the family line. In 1527 the first William succeeded his half-brother James as bishop of Dunblane, having already acted as James’s coadjutor (assistant bishop): this William fathered a brood of children, necessarily illegitimate, though that would not have concerned him greatly, any more than ...”

“... a hideous woolly jumper displaying the flags of the EEC nations. Back in the mid-1970s the tycoon James Goldsmith, the future founder of the anti-European Referendum Party, was a prominent supporter of the Common Market. The position of the press also changed. In the earlier campaign the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express enthusiastically made the case ...”

“... former chancellor of the ruling party (and now by the sister-in-law of a former prime minister).Henry​ Mayhew, the mid-Victorian journalist who produced the extraordinary, enormous survey London Labour and the London Poor, wrote best about the city when he could see it from a height. Gazing across London from Hampstead he described a gothic city, skeins ...”

“... she did it through her own vim and vigour … Does the lord chancellor recall that in the reign of Henry VIII it was made high treason to take an appeal outside this kingdom? … I think one can take back the divergence between our legal system and that of the continent to the Fourth Lateran Council.At times he seems to fall into an eerie timelessness, as if ...”

“... are developed, and here Mr Buchan shows much originality and skill. The narrative accents of James, Dawn and William Nelson differ, and in doing so suggest nuances, not only of character but of characteristic medium: for we are tacitly invited to explain the stylistic variations at least partly in terms of the character’s recording method. ...”

“... off-putting model. One readily sees why scrupulous users of English would want to shy from it, as James Greene also does in his translations from Afanasy Fet, which Henry Gifford introduces with a monitory subtext of disengagement: ‘Russian poetry even today keeps the formality of structure, the regular positioning of ...”

“... in Vietnam. We see them anyway, collected in Slotkin’s book and in Warrior Dreams (1994) by James William Gibson. When Philip Caputo joined the Marines, he saw himself ‘charging up some distant beachhead, like John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima’. ‘War movies with John Wayne’ sent Ron Kovic to Vietnam: ‘Yes, I gave my dead dick for John ...”

“... saying that the only VC awarded to an Ulsterman during the war had been won by a Catholic, James Magennis. One of the people on the panel, his boss, came back at him in a dull stupid rigid voice: ‘I happen to know he only got the Victoria Cross because he happened to be a Catholic.’ That combination of bigotry, crassness and sheer thick ignorance ...”

“... whom a title might be hoped for in return. Leading examples of Scott’s oiling of royalty are his James V of Scotland in The Lady of the Lake (1809), Queen Caroline, consort of George II, as a healing principle of Mercy in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), and Queen Elizabeth I, epitome of successful English monarchs, in Kenilworth (1821). Sutherland is ...”

“... Anyone who knew or knew of James Lees-Milne in his later years might have formed the impression of an exquisitely polished round peg in a perfectly round hole. Aesthete, diarist, wit, he had known everyone from the Mitfords to Mick Jagger and wrote about them amusingly. His work for the National Trust over three decades had made him personally and professionally familiar with most of the great houses of England ...”

“... Broadway, but he would never act there again. There would be no Hamlet or Lear, no Vanya or James Tyrone. His one shot at Shakespeare was as Antony in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar (1953), where he amazed many doubters and impressed John Gielgud (his Cassius), by handling the verse as easily as he had muttered and snarled in Streetcar ...”