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“... determination to get drunk. In this aim they were all too successful, so that a visit to the King (it was always singular in conversation, even if the sign over the door said otherwise) and Keys was liable to be hazardous for a relatively sober Expressman. Fights were frequent, bawling arguments were perpetual, and many of the participants were senior ...”

“... If Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot had achieved Cabinet rank together in the 1960s, the United Kingdom would be in better shape now. ‘That is my truth,’ as Bevan used to say. ‘Now tell me yours.’ What have they in common, though, this leftist Gang of Three, the Englishman, the Welshman and the Scot, Bevan, his wife and his friend, all from such different backgrounds? They have similar opinions, of course: but what of their human and moral nature, their style of writing and speaking? It may be worth noting that all three are childless and parentful: all three have been devoted to Protestant Christian parents and have (to my regret) firmly rejected the faith of their fathers ...”

“... drawings and paintings – and commissioned photographs. Some of the most powerful were by David King. He used to come blazing into the office with his huge black-and-white portraits, already measured up for size: no question, ever, of anything being cropped. One was of the writer Francis Wyndham, then in his sixties, in conversation with a 34-year-old Alan ...”

“... of the Fifties) Donald Davie, who kept the subject respectable, the interest alive. Michael Alexander suggests that ‘indifference and bafflement are today more common than hostility,’ and that may be so. But there has been some excellent work done on Pound recently: Richard Sieburth’s Instigations, Leon Surette’s A Light from ...”

“... illness. He had an equerry, Colonel Manners, who, bringing him his dinner one day, discovered the King had hidden under the sofa. A Jeeves before his time, Manners imperturbably laid a place for His Majesty on the carpet and put down the plate. He was retiring discreetly when the King said (still sous bergère), ‘That was ...”

“... Perched​ on one platform, King Charles I; perched on another, the Dutch painter Daniel Mytens; lowered in between them, a canvas some two feet taller than the king, who was reportedly of small stature. If, as an inscription on the finished portrait insists, the likeness was painted ad vivum, then this might have been the way to do it ...”

“... and cushions piled high on the stone and sand of the quarry to create a luxurious court. A king and his entourage loll back, enjoying a witty puppet-show produced from behind a multi-coloured cloth. The puppet seems to run amok, stealing kisses from the ladies. It’s all very relaxed, recalling the convivial atmosphere of the court entertainment in A ...”

“... Vespers by Anthony Hecht should be able to sustain the weight of its three epigraphs: one from King Lear, one from Moby Dick and one by Beethoven. And indeed, Hecht’s shorter poems, chatty and clever, with their immense vocabulary and consummate prosody (why is it that these last should now be the virtual prerogative of American poets?), are often no ...”

“... legally enshrined, lethally enforced white supremacy to an end. Its national hero is Martin Luther King Jr. Far from giving way in the face of moral example and legal right, racial injustice rose to fever pitch during the 1960s. The third and deadliest Ku Klux Klan (succeeding the Southern Klan of the late 1860s and the national Klan of the 1920s) dynamited ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives ...”

“... than two pages devoted to its royal house, which is rather modest considering that His Majesty King Michael I of Romania serves as Chairman of the Comité de Patronage of the Société des Amis de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to ...”

“... irresistible, when everything essential to that theatre actually lies beyond archaeology. As Michael Hattaway reminds us in his eloquent new study of Elizabethan Popular Theatre, the Rose, the Curtain, the Globe and the rest did not define the drama that they housed. Far more important than the ‘wooden O’ and ‘cockpit’ were those shared attitudes ...”

“... Ralph Ineson, as the injured captain reporting to Duncan after a battle, laughs out loud when the king asks him if Macbeth and Banquo were not ‘dismayed’ by the arrival of reinforcements for the enemy. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘as sparrows, eagles, or the hare, the lion.’ This is the person the king has called a ...”

“... And then there is Prince, almost the only woman in this set-up, very well played by Joey King, who looks like a harmless, slightly over-age schoolgirl, complete with smart skirt and tie, and has an air of innocence that convinces us at once that she may be the most dangerous figure on the train. We don’t know what her mission is until late in the ...”

“... was sung to open the games. Only Americans – Dennis Mitchell after winning a 100-metres heat and Michael Johnson after taking the 200-metre gold – puffed out their chests and pulled their jerseys to display the national emblem. Only Americans accused an Irish swimmer of using drugs when she won the Olympic gold. Only an eliminated American boxer, Fernando ...”