“... often included figurative and allegorical representations: ‘The “chemical wedding” of solar king and lunar queen might represent the alchemical process of conjunction – the physical joining of gold and silver – or suggest an analogy for the mysterious and unseen bonds between substances, now envisioned in terms of human desire.’ Naked men and ...”

“... of letters, present them with nothing but horror and crueltie’. In The Scholemaster (1570), Roger Ascham argued that ‘yong children [are] soner allured by loue, then driuen by beating, to attayne good learning.’ But he could do little to shake the general assumption that ‘the best Scholemaster of our time, was the greatest beater.’ As a grammar ...”

“... fabrication that the saint, almost certainly Greek, was actually the daughter of the British king Coel. The book features the sort of young woman you might find in Angela Brazil, given to saying such things as ‘What a lark! What a sell!’ Converted as an old lady to the new religion, she conceives the duty of her piety to be the discovery and ...”

“... the exams that I was leaving school. When I thought about it, sitting on the playing field at King Alfred’s, the day school that had agreed to take me for the past three years, I’d never heard of anyone going to university after school who didn’t have anywhere to go in the holidays. Where would I live? It seemed an improbable thing and I certainly ...”

“... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...”

“... encounters. An English journalist protests his eagerness to spill Duke’s revelations of the King onto the page. The two men haggle and conspire, and Duke blackmails his old friend. This cameo of the turncoat arises out of Bleasdale’s desire to ‘redress the balance’ in Elvis affairs after Goldman and ‘that book’, although much of his villain ...”

“... piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George III King of England. The Founding Fathers, wise in their generation, could not foresee Hot Lines, B52s and the social security system, but they knew that they had created an office that might be dangerous to liberty. Hence they hedged it round as best they could with ...”

“... at the British Council in 2004 he appreciatively cited Goodhart along with Melanie Phillips and Roger Scruton in a disquisition on the ‘core values of Britishness’ (‘There is indeed a golden thread that runs through British history of the individual standing firm for freedom and liberty against tyranny’). On a trip to East Africa the following ...”

“... there would be an American on the moon before the end of the decade. Was that even possible? As​ Roger Launius, a former official historian of Nasa, explains in Reaching for the Moon, Kennedy was initially unwilling to commit to the expense of space exploration; he changed his mind after Yuri Gagarin’s orbit of Earth on 12 April 1961 and the Bay of Pigs ...”

“... robbery and rape of a woman of 88; gang warfare, vandalism, uriniferous subways, bent policemen. Roger Scruton devoted a Times column to a crude misreading of a poem by Reading about Lebanon, a controversy to which Ukulele Music alludes. Reading’s charlady supplies a suitable retort to Scruton – ‘When we want you to chirp up matey, we’ll rattle the ...”

“... you are gentleman,’ Morgan said.   No one moved.   Morgan went over to Edward King, head of the Union Trust, and drew him to the table.   ‘There’s the place, King,’ he said, ‘and here’s the pen.’ King signed. The other presidents followed suit ... The ...”

“... as a detective. He had cleared Mata Hari of espionage, and he attempted to smear the Irish patriot Roger Casement as a homosexual. But his Milliner’s Hat Mystery provided the inspiration for what might be one of the most effective acts of deception in World War Two. ‘The novel opens on a stormy night with the discovery of a dead man in a barn, carrying ...”

“... on the great altar of Notre Dame, hoping that news of its existence would thus reach the King and make it more difficult for his enemies to suppress it. But when he entered Notre Dame he found that his way to the altar was barred by a grill he had never seen before. He felt that Heaven itself was collaborating with the iniquitous work of men and he ...”

“... volume is his relationship – political rather than personal – with the sinister Leopold II, King of the Belgians, who used him as an instrument of his ambition to acquire a colony in Africa. Stanley was unlucky in his choice of patron (or unlucky to have been chosen by him), for his Herculean labours in founding the Congo Free State were to be ...”

“... and beautiful, quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might ...”