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“... world dominance of Christianity. America comes into the act with recent scholarship arguing that Christopher Columbus – in his self-appointed task as Christoferens, of Christ-bearer – relied heavily on works which connected great conjunctions with change in empires. He noted the rulership of Saturn over India, and copied out a passage of a work deriving ...”

“... are all he has been allocated to deal with the vast subject of ‘the war and German society’, Christopher Friedrichs mentions the diary of Hans Heberle, a shoemaker from a village near Ulm, but he hasn’t the space for quotations, or indeed anything more than a summary of the problems involved in assessing the damage done by thirty years of ...”

“... presence of two anti-boy women ... complicated the atmosphere, because Benjamin likes to be with Christopher and Wystan, all boys together without disturbing foreign elements such as slightly hostile ladies and gentlemen hostile to gay music.’ Pears sang a song which Britten had made from one of Spender’s poems, ‘a very Stephenish one full of slightly ...”

“... born’. Death, ever strict in his arrest, may even take to parading through the streets like a king. Thus Tamburlaine, the very emblem of mortality, sweeps through the world like a pestilential scourge of God, riding ‘in triumph’ over the carcasses of those he has slain. Of course, death ultimately claims Tamburlaine himself, and his growing awareness ...”

“... could cite the odd tag from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus’s assertion ‘let there be one king’ was a favourite), but even literate people would have had only a general idea that the Odyssey was about a magical journey home and that the Iliad was about war. The few who actually read Homer at this time tended to read Latin translations, such as those ...”

“... Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my director, Sydney Pollack. Isherwood now lived on the palisade just above the street. The memory of this creative ...”

“... is captured by the Japanese in Malaya and is murdered on a jungle march, and his younger brother Christopher, with extraordinary persistence – bombarding the Air Ministry with letters and making the journey to Malaysia, questioning villagers all along the death-route – manages to track down the grave. One is gripped and would be glad to have been offered ...”

“... was charged with corporate manslaughter over the ferry disaster at Zeebrugge), and like Lord King, whose advice Thatcher sought constantly without realising that British Airways was engaged in an entrepreneurial dirty tricks campaign against its main competitor, Lord Hanson became one of the Inner Circle which helped the Government to achieve what seemed ...”

“... stale, unreal, unconfident, artificial, class-ridden. And that no doubt was the case; although, as Christopher Innes pointed out in his chapter on Rattigan in Modern British Drama 1890-1990, the two situation comedies are very similar. Of course, Osborne’s style of making a fuss was a new thing in the theatre; Rattigan’s characters were schooled to keep a ...”

“... Allen is another Thirties man. Senior to Mr Symons by less than a year, he was the first boy from King Edward’s Grammar School, Ashton, ever to attempt Oxford entrance, being sent up to Balliol as a candidate for a scholarship in English literature. He failed to win it, but describes the occasion in the first of many scintillating set-pieces of ...”

“... febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II trembled at the sight of a naked sword: and the sight of an ass, if the chronicle of the time can be believed, sufficed to cause the Duke of Epernon to lose consciousness.’ Other stalwarts included Hobbes (fear of darkness), Pascal (fear of ...”

“... voices and having visions. The conclusion of the Civil Wars and the imminent execution of the king drove him into a chiliastic frenzy in which he anticipated the Second Coming and the conversion of England into a paradise for saints. His visions were erratic and his millenarianism combined strands of two usually incompatible sets of ...”

“... in 1974, crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested ...”

“... a single non-royal person was common, even commoner than either genuinely personal monarchy, the king his own minister, or conciliar, collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who ...”

“... in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The editors promise to ‘elucidate the difficulties’ of Eliot’s work by tracing every possible verbal overlap between the words used in his poems and the words used by other writers, both famous and obscure, in texts that ...”