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“... up with the petty feuds of office – which can be as contradictory as they are amusing. When Tom King came in as Secretary of State for Employment over Clark, the junior Minister bridled. He regarded his new master with contempt. This contempt continued until July 1989 when Clark read in the papers that King was to be ...”

“... The terms on which this book is set up are prefigured in the split title – Allen Lane: King Penguin. In Elizabethan drama the king’s two bodies might well be a theme for tragedy, and a latterday Lytton Strachey might have made much of the hypocritical discrepancies between public eminence and private person ...”

“... precedent that the House could make law without the participation of the House of Lords or of the king. He had established the right of electors to elect whomever they please and the principle that no constituency could be represented by anyone they had not elected. He had brought before the British public the injustices of the electoral system and the need ...”

“... the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have long known of his shareholding. But it vividly illustrates the fact that the elite had a stake in the seamiest forms of overseas expansion.Because companies landed in unmapped and poorly understood ...”

“... royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King could not be directly blamed for these upsets, those who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ‘all this’ is still debated. The way in which the commotions began ...”

“... Yet the price paid for good sources at this stage of history is that they rarely agree. Take King Harold’s arrow in the eye, a central icon of English history. We have a number of accounts of his death, all of which differ. What may well be the earliest version (though not all historians agree) has him cut down by William himself, together with the ...”

“... it presented itself as the preserver of a hallowed constitution. It claimed to be fighting for ‘king and Parliament’, professed undying loyalty to Charles, and blamed the situation not on him but on evil advisers and established institutions. Those justifications were repeated regularly, if with diminishing conviction, throughout the war of 1642-46. Yet ...”

“... At the treason trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the King and usurp the powers of government, but the juries rejected this claim each time it was put before them, no doubt because it relied on arguments about what would count as usurpation and deposition which were figurative and technical to the point of ...”

“... Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th century,’ as Michael Rogin describes him. Eyes wide and mouth agape, arms outstretched and face painted black, Jolson concludes his performance in The Jazz Singer (1927) down on one knee, serenading the delighted actress who plays his mother in a voice as strong and piercing as a foghorn ...”

“... covers the Middle East but not Algeria, he pulls no punches. ‘Reporters,’ he writes, ‘know King Fahd to be lazy, corrupt, ignorant and a drunk, but little is written about these things and he is still the West’s man.’ Prince Sultan, the Saudi Defence Minister, is one of the Kingdom’s biggest ‘skimmers’, making billions out of arms ...”

“... of Allied troops to be flung ashore in France to establish a Second Front. In this respect Michael Foot was more gung-ho than Churchill, who feared a massacre on the beaches. One quality that did distinguish Churchill from many other figures in British public life was a brooding consciousness of the war as another stage in the descent of the 20th ...”

“... in the harsh translation by G.S. Fraser in the New Directions Selected Poems: ‘God Save the King’ the trumpets moan and groan From a pavilion high on piles That gape to let the sea through when it comes To wash out wet Horse-hoofmarks on the sand Of this sea-shore. Coldly the wind claws me But a burning light snakes along the windows And white mica ...”

“... collection of misfits in a bar change emotional partners and dance through the night.’ (Yes, and King Lear chooses his friends unwisely and gets lost in bad weather.) And history is rewritten. The File quotes Williams’s preface to Camino Real: ‘I only know that I have felt a release in this work which I wanted you to feel with me.’ The trouble is, the ...”

“... and by amusing her family with assorted comic turns, such as a belched version of ‘God Save the King’. Even as a tot, George stuck close to her sophisticated, largely homosexual coterie, and would sometimes be dug out of bed to delight them with his imitations of louche popular singers. He often didn’t know what they meant, he says, ‘but I had ...”

“... our hero believes ‘that a daring feat of arms in the service of public order’ will allow the King of Spain to place him ‘in a position more to [his] liking’. He has a special advantage in this mission. He knows Vicuña, who worked for him when he was pacifying the Indians – or rather, worked for the Indians though he was nominally in the service of ...”