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“... voyage gave him ample time to finish editing the hefty etiquette guide that would undergird the majesty of his new court, at which his guards – all six-footers – would wear helmets decorated with a Mexican eagle on a prickly pear cactus, devouring a snake. A mere four years later, however, Maximilian’s crudely mummified body was returned to Trieste ...”

“... The Resurrection was published as a chromolithograph. But the impact of the ‘awful and unearthly majesty in his countenance, in the large eyes fixed on vacancy, and in the still placid features’, and the effect of dawn light (the way the ‘cold grey morning creeps along the hills, and the dark trees stand motionless’), are better conveyed by Layard’s ...”

“... Hotel in Granard, a small town 16 miles from Longford town. ‘Auntie Thornton’, as we called her, was also involved in the Republican movement: on this occasion, however, it wasn’t subversion but match-making that was on her mind. Collins might have been a revolutionary leader in the making, but he was also a grand ...”

“... of Alice’s dream enjoy using the words ‘never’ and ‘always’. ‘Always say “Your majesty”,’ the Red Queen commands, while the old crab warns her daughter: ‘Let this be a lesson to you never to lose your temper!’ Wonderland has plenty of pedagogues, and Alice observes at one point that she might as ...”

“... in the Communist period must assume that the old Security Service built up a dossier on him or her. Mine is now in the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, and I can read it. I don’t know what it contains. Much irrelevant rubbish, no doubt: surveillance teams have to justify their expenses. But one thing I am prepared for: reports to the secret ...”

“... any words or sentences to excite or stir up the people to hatred or contempt of the person of his Majesty, his heirs or successors, or the government and constitution of this realm as by law established … The words in this clause from ‘to excite, or stir up’ through to ‘government’ were taken almost verbatim from an act passed during the reign of ...”

“... and by his ‘strong possession’ of the throne, to which his mother, Eleanor, is prompted by her ‘conscience’ to reply in an aside: ‘Your strong possession much more than your right’. She knows Arthur to be the legitimate claimant. Lake swoops on the exchange, which is ‘intended deliberately to locate the play in the midst of’ the debates ...”

“... Essentially, as Philip French once observed, it is ‘America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past, however honestly or dishonestly’. As is the literary history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s much anthologised essay ‘The Westerner’ is a précis of Cold War ...”

“... co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department. She had previously produced four well-received mysteries and this was her first work of non-fiction (apart, presumably, from interdepartmental memos, annual reports ...”

“... sword: mocked by his minions, he appeals to Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, who thereupon enters in majesty and introduces the instruments of modern science. The open-air production took full shape during Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria ...”

“... after his death in 1680 at the age of 33, the poet Rochester was the guide who would have led her ‘right in wisdom’s way’: He civilised the rude and taught the young, Made fools grow wise, such artful music hung Upon his useful, kind, instructing tongue. Rochester’s modern editors and biographers are well aware of Wharton’s elegy, but they are ...”

“... on ‘our nation’s Capitol’ (for maximum effect, the phrase needs to be intoned with baleful majesty – eyeballs big and hideously bulging). The same ugly question kept intruding: would house-wrecker Highsmith – everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope – have relished the day’s cascading idiocy?As an embittered ...”

“... earthworm, whose excrement carried the germ. He was also famously taciturn. On the anniversary of her wedding, Mme Pasteur wrote to her daughter: ‘Your father, very busy as always, says little to me, sleeps little, and gets up at dawn – in a word, continues the life that I began with him 35 years ago today.’ One of ...”

“... with the cry of ‘Murder!’ ringing through the playhouse, the white-faced widow shouting in her box, the silly-looking theatregoers rushing on stage: ‘a dense and motley crowd, like some horrible carnival – the actors and actresses all there in their play-costumes and painted faces, with mortal fright showing through the rouge ... In the midst of ...”

“... Confession that one has no idea why Burns did this or that, or what he thought about him or her, has seemed almost disloyal to the Immortal Memory. This is an anniversary year, marking 250 years since Robert Burns was born in the cottage his father built at Alloway, near Ayr. On 25 January, 1030 Burns Clubs with 80,000 members in 18 countries performed ...”