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“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... to treat Lawrence as simply the preux chevalier, the schoolboyish hero of derring-do romance. Michael Asher in his fine biographical study, Lawrence the Uncrowned King of Arabia, does not attempt to do so. Asher, who has travelled by camel and by foot where Lawrence went before him, is intensely aware of the genuine ...”

“... victor of Agincourt deserves to be considered a peace-maker as well as a warmonger. The ‘warrior-king’ tradition of both British and French historiography makes him an implacable enemy of the French, but later nationalistic preconceptions have obscured the 15th-century reality. The fact that the two realms of England and France, linked in a dynastic ...”

“... and assume that Labour will sooner or later come a cropper. The Australian strategies adopted by Michael Howard and his advisers at this election were, on the other hand, very risky and, in the end, mistaken, exaggerating as they did the significance of immigration and crime within British politics. Many people ‘care’ about immigration and crime, but ...”

“... Show, Married with Children, Fight Club, The Full Monty, Ally McBeal, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, King of the Hill, Titanic. We can usually think of one or two of these at the same time, but the sheer extent of Murdoch’s businesses is so vast that it is hard to hold them in the mind simultaneously. When his wife Anna filed for divorce and was asked the ...”

“... twelve. And he’s only fifteen now but you wouldn’t know.He said, ‘Are you sure?’I said, ‘Michael. It’s a spot, love, that’s all it is,’ and I got him some stuff to put on.He gets his trousers up sharp.He said, ‘Don’t tell Dad.’‘Why should I tell Dad? Why should I tell Dad anything?’‘And don’t tell our Maureen.’‘As if,’ I ...”

“... on for itself the name of Israel. The two monarchies had only ever achieved unity under a single king for a brief period, and Judah was content to go its own way, cherishing its capital, Jerusalem, as a sacred place, with a monumental temple that became increasingly emblematic of Jewish faith and identity. For nine centuries, from its foundation until its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... made it through. Leopold McClintock, despatched by Lady Franklin to search for her husband on King William Island, tried six times to penetrate Bellot Strait during the summer of 1858 before continuing his journey by dog-sled. It took Roald Amundsen three years – including two winters lodged in the ice – to complete the first full transit of the ...”

“... jungle home is no place for pastoral softies. Each skinny-dipping spree ends in a struggle with a king-sized crocodile; rhinos disrupt picnics; love-trysts are interrupted by lions. How was this ever considered perfect entertainment for children? Since this fake celebrity memoir makes fun of the form’s tendency to caress the subject’s ego, it’s apt that ...”

“... Archimedes, Bismarck, the Bible, Elizabeth Bishop, classical mythology, Coltrane, Einstein, Freud, King Lear, Marie Antoinette, Picasso, Puccini, Ramesses, Van Gogh and so forth. (One of the pleasures of earlier Lleshanaku, you realise wistfully, is the absence of such things, in the way that Prague or Budapest used not to be lit up at night and their streets ...”

“... difficult to read Milton’s narrative in Paradise Lost in this way – we visualise the Archangel Michael’s two-handed sword not as the double lever on a printing press, but simply as a sword, while we see ‘chaos’ and the ‘abyss’ physically, as part of outer space. Yet Milton, the adept student of Spenser, was designing a flexibly symbolic ...”

“... malevolent, piteous or merely inaccurate, ought to be wound up after the publication of Michael Straight’s contribution. Very possibly, Anthony Blunt will one day write such a book himself. But the names have almost all been named, the questions of motive worn smooth, the titles and pensions (some of them) stripped like epaulettes, the spell in ...”

“... the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a ...”

“... perhaps Blake used the copper plate as a sketchpad, as Peter Ackroyd suggests in his biography. Michael Phillips’s replicas of the original plates testify to the artist’s industry and also to the devotion of modern Blakeans. The lay observer can hardly bear to contemplate the toil involved in all that neat, packed engraving, let alone in having to do ...”