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“... They are large and fierce and hungry, and they are on their way from Oran as a present to the King of Spain. It’s true that they are not really an adventure in Quixote’s sense, and that he has no business having them released so that he can fight them. But equally there can be no doubt of his extraordinary courage in facing them and it’s hard, as ...”

“... of erasure through which – by order of the Protestant Duke of Somerset, the lord protector of King Edward VI, who was a minor – the occupants of the St Paul’s charnel house were consigned to symbolic oblivion. If charnels had once served as ‘a kind of waystation for the dead as they made their slow progress from this life to the next’, this ...”

“... to the city. There he was determined above all to visit the house in which the ambassador of the King of Persia lived. He had the vague hope that he might somehow find a clue there.’ This is typical in its over-emphasis. It’s a perfectly ordinary moment in the story, which needs one or two functional sentences, not ‘above ...”

“... to look for ways of remaining unapologetically gay writers without writing ‘gay novels’. Michael Cunningham won a large readership with The Hours, in which gay lives featured without being allowed to predominate, though his touch seems less sure in his most recent offering, By Nightfall. A narrative about a married man’s brief and inconclusive ...”

“... to clamber round the intricate corridors of another octagon, the very strange Red Mount Chapel in King’s Lynn, which seems to be some 15th-century Norfolk pilgrim’s effort to reproduce either the tangled claustrophobia of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the outward appearance of the Dome of the Rock, which Christian tour-guides in Jerusalem ...”

“... 1352, which is still on the statute book, treason consists of ‘Compassing the Death of the King, Queen, or their eldest Son; violating the Queen, or the King’s eldest Daughter unmarried, or his eldest Son’s Wife; levying War; adhering to the King’s Enemies; killing the ...”

“... like some pop-star badge, an enamel medallion exhibiting a boar – the emblem of her favourite king. To my regret, I could not make out whether she was also wearing the ring and bracelet which usually go with the medallion. Reality had outdone fiction. This little Tube scene I shall always retain as the epitome of a certain vision of Britain today – a ...”

“... Hope’ (1986) ‘Naked’ (1988) ‘Balloon Dog’ (1994-2000) ‘Bear and Policeman’ (1998) ‘Michael Jackson and Bubbles’ (1988)PreviousNext Koons broke through in the early 1980s with a series titled ‘The New’ consisting of store-bought vacuum cleaners and other pristine appliances; set on or placed inside fluorescent light boxes, each immaculate ...”

“... a complication has emerged, which threatens to bar our family’s return to its amnesiac state. Michael Collins, Neil Jordan’s film, is not about us as a family, but we are part of its revolutionary story and provide much of its romance. In May 1917, Michael Collins came down for a few days to Longford, one of those ...”

“... Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to weaken his defence by advancing a pawn. There are further forces I can bring into play. I find it slightly frustrating that my mechanical opponent either knows what I mean to do or has taken standard precautions: there’s a knight in the way, and I can’t get at it ...”

“... history. On the only occasion that I knowingly met a Cambridge spy, I broached the same question. Michael Straight, a distinguished East Coast American liberal and publisher (he had run the New Republic during the queasy years of McCarthy, and if exposed during that period could have helped discredit a cause larger than himself in much the same way as the ...”

“... William Rees-Mogg – do not wish to argue that the Americans or, say, the Swiss ought to have a king. And many would probably be embarrassed to have the Windsors bracketed with the House of Saud or the Sultan of Brunei – although these are the only two monarchies to compare with them in wealth: the Japanese royal family, though presiding over a far richer ...”

“... or Drobny (to say nothing of Agassi’s erstwhile brother-in-law Gonzales) could have taken the King of Las Vegas handily, his amazing speed, anticipation and racket control notwithstanding. The core of championship tennis has always been the attacking, i.e. serve and volley game. Ground strokes were important for opening up the court, making an approach to ...”

“... the All Party Alliance, although a wit said that his only allies were Anthony Morton, Gordon Ashe, Michael Halliday and other Creasey pseudonyms.) His books were popular but not highly regarded, and this worried and baffled him. Why, he asked me once, was there thought to be so much difference between Creasey and Shakespeare? Wasn’t Macbeth a crime ...”

“... the paper, then under the nominal direction of a senile manager and an infant editor. Parnell, Michael Davitt and the Land League were accused of having inspired agrarian outrages including murder, arson, horse-gelding and cattle-houghing. Certainly they had developed ostracism as a weapon, causing it to be christened the ‘Boycott’ after the landlord ...”