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“... Price); a memoir by its most senior diplomat, the former ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer; and now memoirs by the former prime minister’s wife, his deputy and his bagman. The granddaddy of them all, Blair’s own memoirs, are still to come. It is an unprecedented cascade of memoirs by prominent figures in a government which ...”

“... demandingly, how it avoids invalidating itself. This shows up the advantage of the philosopher-king model, which can at least base its method of reaching political decisions on the philosophers’ claims to know best. Matters are made worse by the leaden style in which Between Facts and Norms is written. If poetry is what is lost in ...”

“... Magdalene’ is a black comedy about furious turn-over in an old people’s home. Leonard Deane-King combines Science Fiction and fairy-tale in ‘Good Intentions’ – a story which will appeal to admirers of Spielberg’s E.T. – when Chaz and Len find a friendly Martian in the backyard. Mark Illis’s ‘Loomis’ describes an encounter in Eastern ...”

“... Charles was not being taken in by Laud. Were not the Laudians, outwardly so deferential to the king who backed their policies, using his support to entrench the Church’s power so deeply that no future monarch could break it? The political loyalty of bishops was always conditional, after the Reformation as before. That loyalty had looked doubtful in the ...”

“... their majesties’ heads onto bodies sketched out in conventional Islamic fashion, converting the King Emperor and his consort into something very different from their squat Anglo-Germanic selves. Even when British aesthetics were imported into colonies wholesale meanings shifted. Thomas Metcalf remarks that the Parliament building in Ottawa, like ...”

“... hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake finishing his game of bowls and Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle, they all belonged as much to folklore as to history; and folklore, so far as enlightened opinion was ...”

“... Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the ...”

“... emotionally as well as intellectually. Who would not sympathise with the long-serving priest Christopher Trychay, trying amid the upheavals of four reigns to hang on to his parishioners, his income, his integrity and his vestments? The people of Morebath do not seem to have been eager for reform, or change of any kind. In Duffy’s view, the reign of ...”

“... jazz club stands). Within a few days Wolfgang and Nannerl had been granted an audience with King George III and Queen Charlotte, but their trip was very nearly derailed when Leopold contracted a throat infection that left him bedbound for weeks. With all concerts cancelled for the duration, Wolfgang was able to concentrate on composition for the first ...”

“... process abandoning Thatcher’s free market legacies. On the opening day, the conference director, Christopher DeMuth, responded that he had ‘communed’ with the ghost of the Iron Lady, who had let him know that she was ‘on board’ with the circus of flag, family and nation. When the proceedings began, the agenda was dominated by wokeness. Woke schools ...”

“... at Haileybury College, a training school for the East India Company. He became a member of the King of Clubs, a dining society for Whig luminaries, and was friendly with the editors of the Edinburgh Review. His fame grew with the publication of a vastly expanded second edition in 1803, which substantiated the basic principle of population with references ...”

“... ways a book for its time. Tuchman’s story begins with Edward VII’s funeral on 20 May 1910. The king’s sister-in-law, the empress consort of Russia, Maria Feodorovna, wife of Alexander III, was there. So was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the aged Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. And so was Edward’s least favourite nephew, Wilhelm II of ...”

“... that would be essential to dramatic invention. By contrast with university-educated rivals like Christopher Marlowe and John Marston, or the erudite autodidact Ben Jonson, Shakespeare owed most of his classical knowledge to his education in a provincial grammar school; but, in spite of Jonson’s condescending reference to his ‘small Latin and less ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... quoted.’ Not in 1832, they don’t: both these stanzas were added in 1842, and were probably, as Christopher Ricks suggests, ‘precipitated by the death of Hallam’. The oddest features of Tucker’s method of ‘specifically literary biography’ is that it is confined to Part One of the book. He sees Tennyson’s career divided into a phase of ...”