“... the Persians, or perhaps by a renegade Roman soldier. Others believed God had taken no chances. John Malalas, the author of a sixth-century chronicle of the world that began with the Creation, reported a dream in which a bishop transported to heaven witnessed an enthroned Christ instruct the martyr-saint Mercurius: ‘Go forth and kill the emperor ...”

“... which reworks ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’:Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?      The old King to the sparrow:Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?      Rust to the harrow:Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?      Where rests she now her head,Bathed in eve’s loveliness’? –      That’s what I said.Who said, ‘Ay, mum’s the ...”

“... such as Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford. But he became obsessed by trying to convert John Betjeman to his own faith, and bombarded the poet with furious injunctions to submit. ‘If you try to base your life and hopes on logical absurdities YOU WILL GO MAD,’ he wrote, adding, with a sentence which is not distinguished for its sanity: ‘It ...”

“... sciences, distracted by ‘methods’ which regard Mickey Mouse and the Mona Lisa, Superman and King Lear, advertising jingles and the works of Schoenberg, as equally legitimate objects of inquiry. Is this movement a reaction against critical moralism, expressed with a hesitancy so great that only massive recourse to technicality can prevent it from ...”

“... turned his back on a royal commission that every other artist was vying for. After calling on the King, the artist simply returned home, where he was found sitting serenely cross-legged and wearing no clothes. The King declared this man to be the true artist. ‘Why is it,’ asks Fei Dawei, ‘that even as early as two ...”

“... the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation. While he was still at that ministry and ...”

“... on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities. Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the ...”

“... age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... his opponent was saying exhibited the profound conviction of his own beliefs. Did not the poet King David say: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward and put to confusion, that desire my hurt’? Individualism, bordering on eccentricity, even to the extent of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your ...”

“... of a ‘new world-epoch’, but the death of an old one: Natty is in his seventies, and Indian John, as Chingachgook is called by the residents of Templeton, a frontier settlement based on the Cooperstown of the novelist’s childhood, is a sad shadow of the Mohican warrior he once was, especially in the Christmas tavern scene in which he partakes a little ...”

“... his eyes lasered. If you’ve watched D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus’s 1981 documentary about John DeLorean, another car man with a magic touch, you may recognise this as the moment where the hitherto unprepossessing DeLorean sheds his corporate image, making himself over as an American playboy with model girlfriends and a sexily enhanced new ...”

“... the White House said, to lobbying by the powerful and unlikely duo of Henry Kissinger and Elton John. Nonetheless Amiel remains furious at the way she and Black have been treated and is intent on establishing his innocence on all counts. Her memoir is a bookend to his, A Matter of Principle, published in 2011, in which he praises her ‘constancy, resolve ...”

“... monarchism is in tension with some proto-republican elements. Paulin’s next major monarchist, John Dryden, seems a less ambiguous figure: ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, which Paulin much admires and prints in full, presents the political debate stirred up by the Whigs as a feverish disease of which the body politic needs to be cured. This nostalgia for an ...”

“... guinea pigs. In 1822, the illiterate young French-Canadian was working as a ‘voyageur’ for John Jacob Astor’s fur-trading company in northern Michigan. He was hanging out with a bunch of rowdies in the company store when a shotgun accidentally went off and he was hit below his left nipple. The injury was serious and likely to be fatal – his ...”