“... and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the crown from his never-to-be-equalled father, has now disinherited his own son, thereby occasioning the battle. Outside the obsessively patrilineal English histories, trouble between fathers and daughters seems just as common, whether ...”

“... daily injustices and indignities of the Jim Crow South. Today, with the birthday of Martin Luther King a national holiday and Alabama cities like Birmingham, Selma and Montgomery competing to attract tourists by highlighting their role in the struggle for racial justice, Rosa Parks has become a national icon second only to ...”

“... can see that the two halves would actually fit together. The gap should not be there. What Peter James – the main author and incidentally the designer of the jacket – and his four collaborators seek to prove is, put simply, that the entire early history of the civilised world has been similarly distorted. An intrusive, imaginary gap, partly of modern ...”

“... position was itself almost as hazardous as those of the characters in the poem, although King Charles, whose favourite poem was Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, loved nothing more than a pungent pro-Establishment satire, and Dryden was well aware that – colleges on bounteous kings depend, And never rebel was to arts a friend. The friend whose ...”

“... about 2300 BC, features a nobleman defending himself thus: I dug a lake, and I planted trees. The king praised me. My father made a will for me, for I was excellent – a man beloved of his father, praised of his mother, whom all his brothers loved. I gave bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, I ferried him who had no boat. The punishment of the wicked ...”

“... Donegal and Cavan – in the Irish Republic. The colonial Plantation of Ulster in the reign of James VI and I covered six counties, but not those of today’s Northern Ireland. Ironically, the counties which became the redoubt of British Protestant settlement – Antrim and Down – were not technically part of the Plantation, which instead encompassed ...”

“... tackle a subject variously seen as gallant paladin, pathological liar and career oddity? Mr James, in this sensible, not too long life, answers with as much moderation and dispassion as can be asked for. He strikes no pose: Arabist, Zionist, Regular Army, anti-Army, Lawrentian or anti-Lawrentian. The book is a steady climb by the South Coll, rather ...”

“... and times. Nicolson’s book in particular did as much to confirm George’s reputation as a good king as it did to confirm his own reputation as a good writer, and established a model for royal biography successfully followed by Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, ...”

“... Bertie – now 21 – ‘shows more and more how totally, totally unfit he is for ever becoming King!’ Neither Victoria nor the constitution could prevent him from ascending to the throne on her death. It didn’t matter. Bertie – this generally amiable but foolish and corpulent cigar-smoking, tiger-shooting adulterer – was a perfectly respectable ...”

“... Since completing the quartet of LA crime novels that made his name, James Ellroy has left us in no doubt that he wants to be more than a genre writer, embarking on a series of books intended to rewrite the history of America between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the ‘Underworld USA’ trilogy. The title is a tribute to Sam Fuller, who directed the film of the same name, but the initial impetus came – as Ellroy frequently acknowledges – from Libra, Don DeLillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald novel ...”

“... and was among those executed after the rebellion. ‘The play,’ he averred, ‘was of King Harry the 4th, and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of ...”

“... swooned over Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and sung and danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I. This is a way of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most unlikely not to have seen herself full-length ...”

“... been a more decidedly royalist turn in early American historiography. Brendan McConville’s The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2006) argues that by the time of the American Revolution colonial Whigs – far from being classical republicans – had abandoned even the ideal of contractual monarchy enshrined in the ...”

“... Esau sells his birthright (Erstgeburt) to Jacob for a dish of lentils (Linsengericht). In the King James version, the passage reads as follows:Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.To illustrate the plight of industrial labour, Marx refashioned ...”

“... lain in bed and been shot by a man! An advocate of non-violence, the disciple of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount, had died by violence – ‘this way, by a gun!’ as Eleanor Mulloncy Lecain exclaims in one of the tributes to Ms Kelly that pad out this book. Not surprisingly, many people in Germany and the United ...”