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“... Brendan King​ starts with a difficulty: Beryl Bainbridge’s writing. It makes everyone else’s prose look flabby. But he also has an advantage: his particular knowledge of her life. King worked with Bainbridge for more than twenty years. He looked after her admin and edited her last novel for publication after her death ...”

“... dragging Mother Image by the hair or the feet down the wormeaten staircase of terrified Syntax’. Brendan King, who has already translated most of Huysmans’s fiction, has produced an excellent version. Rarely can it have been such fun to read translated denunciations of so many forgotten French pictures. The edition also includes scores of small black ...”

“... a gaping hole in his body or being burned to ashes by a magical cat.The story of the tenth-century king Gormo in Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes, written around 1200, brings together many of these motifs. Gormo and his men embark on a sea voyage in search of wonders (mirabilia) and come to ‘further Bjarmia’, arriving at a black-walled city ...”

“... did so at the beginning of the Thirty Years War, when Presslaw supported the forlorn ‘Winter King’, but the city managed to escape the Habsburg backlash and maintain a precarious neutrality for most of the rest of the conflict. At the concluding Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the right of free Protestant worship was reaffirmed. As Davies and Moorhouse ...”

“... the oath of succession. He was prepared to swear to the succession itself, which he believed that King and nobles were entitled to change, but was unwilling to swear to the preamble of the Act, since by doing so he would be denying Papal authority and implicitly rejecting the validity of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. From 1527 he had been the ...”

“... decade, however, there has 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 ...”

“... Stephen King has occasionally raised a rueful protest against being typed as a horror writer – even with the consolation of being the best-selling horror writer in the history of the world. But, as he disarmingly reminds us, there is worse literary company than Lovecraft, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and Jackson. ‘I could, for example, be an “important” writer like Joseph Heller and publish a novel every seven years or so, or a “brilliant” writer like John Gardner and write obscure books for bright academics who eat macrobiotic foods and drive old Saabs with faded but still legible GENE McCARTHY FOR PRESIDENT stickers on the rear bumpers ...”

“... Fiction’, ‘who was in the slot-machine racket, decided to go straight and became a laundromat king, sent his daughter to Bennington, where she married a poet-in-residence or a professor of modern linguistic philosophy ... People speak of the lack of tradition or of manners as having a bad effect on the American novel, but the self-made man is a far richer ...”

“... was always a bothering thing. 1911. Was that the Wexford Lock-Out or the visit of the English king? It was both, but it was never both in Ireland. When Irish weather stepped up to the plate you couldn’t wish to be anywhere else in the world. One of that legion of Irish summer days that let you down after the promise of morning, like betting on ...”

“... Henry England, a.k.a. Hal Nine (aristocracy). Henry is ‘in a ridiculous situation’: he is King of England. More precisely, he is Henry IX. (We are in a parallel universe. And perhaps, in another parallel universe, a parallel Martin Amis is dreaming up a potplant-lecturing, tampon-envying Charles III.) Henry has a tremendously posh voice (‘My ...”

“... office as prime minister, Colville, Butler and Chips Channon drank a champagne toast to the ‘King over the water’ – Chamberlain. Of all the appeasers, young and old, Colville was the only one to make the transition from Chamberlain’s inner circle to Churchill’s. The new prime minister took a liking to him, and he – like millions of others ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Buffy the Vampire Slayer) to Pasión de las Pasiones (think telenovelas) to Masks, designed by Brendan Conway in 2017. Player characters in Masks are teen superheroes, protecting a city, forming friendships and allegiances, and seeking a place among the grown-up heroes and baddies in a dangerous world: if ‘the game is about superheroes,’ Conway ...”

“... a supplement of 20 native saints (published in a separate EETS volume), including Aldhelm, Edward King and Martyr, Augustine of Canterbury, Dunstan, Frideswide and Brendan. First printed in 1483, the Golden Legend saw eight more editions, the last by Wynkyn de Worde in 1527, and its popularity showed no sign of waning on ...”

“... wilderness – sometimes presciently, as on Germany, sometimes ludicrously, as in support of the King over abdication – without getting back into office. From young man in a hurry to old codger going nowhere: his hour on the stage of history seemed to be over. If anything, Ramsden goes further than Rhodes James. In itself 1940 was not a lasting ...”