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“... used to be, not by bringing their souls nearer to God, but by bringing their pawns closer to the king, which many readers accepted would do for the time being. In what my headmaster used to call the interim period, self-help books have taken over the world, which is fast becoming a place where no one is safe from the threat of their own ...”

“... transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to assume that artists have been immune to this vice. The fact is that there is also something elusive and opaque about fine cooking or magnificent tennis-playing. Heston Blumenthal probably has no more idea of ...”

“... through state and society in these years came from the very top. As prince of Wales and then king, Edward VII gambled, had mistresses and corrupted his protectors into indulging his whims, while his son was linked to the sordid allegations about aristocrats and male prostitutes in Cleveland Street. Edward was particularly obsessed with dress, which ...”

“... lotion and so on and on – iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic Toby jug … They anticipate John Grindrod’s Weltanschauung. There is very little he sees that can’t have ‘iconic’ attached to it. As he wanders through the places created in the nearly five decades since Thatcher decreed the right to buy he finds the iconic everywhere. He sees it ...”

“... Frye to sue the other members. When they protested through the Lords of the Admiralty to the King, the Chief Justice had the whole lot of them arrested for contempt and released them, when they apologised, with the warning: ‘Whosoever set themselves up in opposition to the law or think themselves above the law will find themselves mistaken.’ Why ...”

“... his life, work and influence on a variety of artists, from Marcel Duchamp to Michel Foucault, John Ashbery to Georges Perec. I recently spent several months working my way through this enormous archive in the stately gloom of the ornately carved Salon de Manuscrits on the first floor of the Bibliothéque Nationale, just down from the Bourse where Roussel ...”

“... CIA by several orders of magnitude. Poring through these files in 1994 was a friend of Morley’s, John Newman, who was completing a book called Oswald and the CIA, published in 1995. Among the new files Newman spotted some routing slips from the CI Staff which recorded the arrival of documents circulated by the FBI, the National Security Agency and a dozen ...”

“... when they developed and patented steam looms for carpet-weaving: ‘Let each carpet produced by John Crossley be its own traveller,’ the slogan went. The Crossley family bought the house from Samuel Morton Peto, who built the Houses of Parliament and Nelson’s Column before going bankrupt from his investments in the railways: he had to give up the house ...”

“... tortured and sent to an unspeakably protracted death, Fanny is saved thanks to the good offices of John Chapman – also known as Johnny Appleseed, pioneer, missionary, follower of Emanuel Swedenborg and one of America’s more colourful minor folk-heroes. The novel concludes with a poem commemorating Chapman, and a short postscript written by Keene to his son ...”

“... British (1987) about Auden, Dali, MacNeice and Co – both begins and ends with the first words of John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ (‘Quinquereme of Nineveh’), like a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Codes and allusions proliferate in ‘Yarrow’ too, but are not allowed to structure its meanings or progression to the same extent; underlying – or ...”

“... began to dominate commentary both on the radio and in the papers. Practically alone of his party, John Major reacted positively, grabbing the now-famous soapbox in Luton and thereby returning to his Brixton political roots. This was the signal for an outbreak of patronising journalism by writers who clearly didn’t know what they wanted. There had been ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... but not hesitant. Parzival is a questing knight who is too polite to ask an obviously ailing king: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ As Ziolkowski says, he unthinkingly obeys the protocol of courtly etiquette, and thereby forgets the Christian imperative of charity. Arguably, he has repressed the instinct of compassion; in that sense, he is inhibited. But ...”

“... and, known as Jeanne des Anges, she toured France, showing her hand to vast crowds, and to the King, the Queen and Cardinal Richelieu. In 1645, a visitor to Loudun, Balthasar de Monconys, went to see the prioress and her sacred hand. Only he did not simply observe; he reached out his hand to hers: ‘With the tip of my fingernail, with a light touch I ...”

“... seldom meets with moderation and when he does, it’s apt to give way to exasperation. And so John Barrell, reviewing his book on Tom Paine (LRB, 30 November 2006): Rights of Man (not The Rights of Man, as Hitchens persistently calls it) was written as an answer to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Hitchens tells us that among others ...”