“... she has even appropriated the Royal insignia for her notepaper. However, Thatcher was like King Midas in reverse. Everything she touched was magically transformed into lead: a metered liberty, the lowest common denominator of coinage. For the golden refulgence of Monarchy this was fatal. Something which ceases being priceless can only appear absurdly ...”

“... on an unprecedented scale is vividly illustrated in The Great Purges, which contains some of David King’s collection of contemporary photographs, together with a commentary by Isaac Deutscher: ‘In presenting these scenes, I had to reconstruct a nightmare.’ We must hope that, for a majority or Russians, their dreams have become pleasanter: but we do well ...”

“... strife under Vichy and the Nazi occupation, have come from transatlantic scholars such as John C. Cairns, Philip Bankwitz, Telford Taylor and Robert O. Paxton. Eleanor M. Gates might modestly disclaim inclusion in such distinguished company. But she has produced a splendid book which is both instructive and moving. She is not much interested in the ...”

“... the same time, it is controversial, for, to revert for a moment to the Stuarts, Dr Morgan has his King Charles’s head. He has returned from his investigations with an enthusiasm for the Coalition which bubbles through all his critical reservations. The standard view of the Lloyd George Government is that it was founded on pure expediency, and its ...”

“... as much of the medieval Alexander, the fictional hero of romantic tradition, as of the ancient King of Macedon. At the moment of his discovery, the impact of America was absorbed in layers of his own reading and made to fit his capacious image of himself. Like the artist who showed Cortés riding into Mexico on an elephant, he accommodated his vision of ...”

“... goddess never left the plucky Eisenhower country mapped by these ‘artworks’. Everyone from John Baldessari to the Rev. Howard Finster recombines tulle and Disney, winged sunglasses and King Kongs with the truly scary hairy monster which has been bought 800 million times. The introduction is helpful about that ...”

“... Auden had gone to Berlin to study soon after he left Oxford. There he met the anthropologist John Layard, who showed him the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. Auden also discovered the gay bars of Berlin. Through Layard he became acquainted with the revolutionary teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane. Auden invited his friend ...”

“... gave rise to a sense of a much broader Phoenician Mediterranean. Melqart, whose name means ‘king of the city’, is said to have been introduced to Tyre in the tenth century bc, but his cult spread widely. Like Hercules, with whom he was later identified, he was a wandering hero, credited with founding many cities. If the tophet cult divides, Melqart ...”

“... Romania, for example. The problems were forcefully pointed out by the troops on the ground when John Major went to visit them in Kuwait after the war. He said that Options for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had ...”

“... abroad. Jones’s father served in the household of the Duke of Cumberland, Ernst Augustus, later King of Hanover, and he spent his youth near Hamburg and went to school in Lüneburg. In short he was, like Will, an exotic, and played to the fact. More important, he had been educated, to the limit of his father’s shabby genteel means, in the German ...”

“... could break out in other friendly states. Asked whether he expected similar unrest in Jordan, John Kerry, who was admirably forthright in calling for Mubarak to stand down, dismissed the idea: ‘King Abdullah of Jordan is extraordinarily intelligent, thoughtful, sensitive, in touch with his people. The monarchy there ...”

“... Then we found out what the modernists were rebelling against.’ Eugenides studied at Brown with John Hawkes and at Stanford with Gilbert Sorrentino, exacting experimentalists who were ‘against order on the whole and against storytelling’. By setting much of his new novel at Brown in the early 1980s, Eugenides returns to the time of the fall; by ...”

“... generally poor affairs, by continental standards. Thomas Farnaby, who edited Seneca’s plays, and John Bond, the editor of Horace, were both schoolmasters and aimed to produce editions which explained what poets meant in terms that could be understood by grammar school and university students. The generation of scholars around Bentley brought about huge ...”

“... as M/M. Some prolific pairings: Harry and Draco from Harry Potter, Edward and Jacob from Twilight, King Arthur and Merlin, Captain America and Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (given the portmanteau Johnlock).If the lure of reading fan fiction is clear, the lure of writing it is less obvious. On the surface, writing ...”

“... of the Balkans’. He is in a Bulgarian café as it explodes with joy at the news that King Alexander of Yugoslavia has been assassinated, and in Ruse entertains his landlady by singing a Marlene Dietrich song backwards (he is English, after all). And one night, south of Varna, he falls off the rocks into the sea and recovers in a cave full of ...”