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“... on, the boundary between flesh and cloth was indeterminate. According to the Book of Job, in the King James version, we are clothed in skin and flesh; but one might equally describe early modern men and women as fleshed in clothes. ‘To be laid out upon a petticoat’ meant to have sex. When Queen Elizabeth imagined the ultimate destitution she said she ...”

“... and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), as toilet paper. Books were pulled apart to serve in the binding and endpapers of later books, the pages of an unwanted Bible perhaps padding the spine of an unholy prose romance. A Booke of ...”

“... excavations had long suggested was the location of prehistoric Knossos, in legend the city of King Minos, Princess Ariadne and the murderous minotaur in its labyrinth. Others had tried to get their hands on the place; Schliemann himself had made a half-hearted attempt to acquire it in the 1880s, boasting that with a hundred men he could excavate it in a ...”

“... II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s ...”

“... line. But he was a loyal servant, impeccably connected, who always voted in Parliament the way the king would have wished and who was wheeled out to dignify state occasions. He gave his translations as New Year gifts to Henry, to the Princess Mary, to Thomas Cromwell. In religious matters he moved, like the king, from ...”

“... world. Recognising that he could have IP with world-changing possibilities, Hooke went to see the King and asked him for a patent – that’s how you could secure your rights to IP in Restoration England, though it was more customary to work through Crown officials. Hooke gave the King an early version of his watch and ...”

“... of Wales asked his father, George V, if he could have the use of Fort Belvedere at Windsor the king was surprised: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ He caved in and perhaps regretted it, for the weekends with their associated guests and amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so ...”

“... had (the Conservatives were returned to power in 1970 after six years of Labour government, and Margaret Thatcher became education secretary), there was little it could do, since local authorities were responsible for running schools.Since then, however, there has been a slow and determined clawing back of control by central government. First the new ...”

“... they made one. Street fighting broke out. Soon it spread to Naples, forcing Ferdinand, the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies, to grant a constitution. All Italy seethed. But did the news from Palermo somehow touch off the explosion in Paris that February? Clark doesn’t do domino theories. Instead, he writes of ‘a plurality of cumulative instabilities ...”

“... epithet. The grandson of Henry VII, the nephew of Henry VIII (his mother was the Tudor Princess Margaret), he began his personal rule by polishing off the enemies of his house, real or imagined, in a burst of destruction, executing or burning to death with enthusiasm. Again, it is impossible to understand the character of Mary Queen of Scots without ...”

“... can see, any linking principle or devices – a bag of nails, in other words. Firebird 2 is also a King Penguin (second series) which means that the ornithology of the anthology is strange. The candescent title and Lawrentian colophon testify to a fierce will to survive (perhaps also to the new style at Harmondsworth). Self-evidently, at least one rebirth has ...”

“... ultimate vindication, however, came with the advent of the Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher in May 1979.’ Roger Scruton, by contrast, is writing in a different register in Enoch at 100 when he laments the loss of ‘philosophical acumen’ that led to the anti-socialist truths of the free market being reiterated ‘far less ...”

“... Amis seemed shrewdly chosen to forestall the ‘Lord Archer wins the lottery’, ‘lucky Stephen King’, or ‘not more cash for Martin’ reactions. Conservative values and Good English (virtues that Sir Kingsley and the Times share) would be the prime beneficiaries of the shattered book agreement. Inside, the op-ed page was dominated by a gloating ‘Good ...”

“... the message of restoration underpinning Masonic ritual – the rebirth in every Master Mason of King Solomon’s murdered builder Hiram Abiff – proved congenial to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and Country hue in Welsh Masonry. On the other hand, John Money, a keen student of provincial clubbability, notes that ...”

“... now the most substantial published discussion of the Salvator Mundi is by Lewis. The new book by Margaret Dalivalle, Martin Kemp and Robert Simon – the leading figure in the process by which the Salvator Mundi was accepted as a work by Leonardo – seems to have been the one announced as forthcoming with Yale University Press in 2011. Although Kemp was not ...”