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“... and medicine murders in grisly detail but paid more attention to what it considered, like King James I, to be the real threat of witchcraft. Another anthropologist, Isak Niehaus, has since published a superb account of witch-hunts in the area, while taking a more sceptical view of witchcraft. Now Colin Murray, an anthropologist, and Peter ...”

“... safer with a fifty-year-old President. Other stock characters are borrowed from fiction, notably King Solomon’s Mines, which D.M. Thomas read with interest when he was a small boy in Australia. Like other boys, he wondered what sort of quarterdeck language Commander Good used when he was swearing at Zulus and whether he responded erotically to the devotion ...”

“... This took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have ...”

“... Eludes Police for Years. American news item. All words in italics are quoted from this. James, the yardman, was working out back,   Maude, the maid, was tossing a salad – what better beginning, if you’re having a crack   at writing a criminal ballad? And I do want to make it plain: Atlanta’s notorious Catwoman had struck again. In a pricey ...”

“... abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His poetry used regularly to be left out of Australian anthologies, but that is an old bad habit we may have grown out of by now. Mr James’s name attracts far more affection than odium, and he gets away with ...”

“... of 1958, a Council of Ministers is responsible for the budget and internal affairs, but only the King can legislate, publish laws, treaties and concessions. A decree of 1961 forbids the formation of political parties, and prohibits the profession of any ideology other than ‘Islam’. Anyone engaging in ‘violent action against the state or the royal ...”

“... plays is interesting, if not totally convincing. His examination of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in the light of Victorian colonial wars is a leisurely discussion of acquiescence in imperialism. But there are occasional remarks, presumably inspired by Marxist assumptions, which not all will share, and which are not supported in a way to carry ...”

“... still in its infancy. In 1717, the Grand Lodge of England was formally established and in 1723, James Anderson, commissioned in 1721 to ‘digest’ the old ‘Gothic’ charges of Masonry, published its modern Constitutions. A Jacobite, the Duke of Wharton, did hold the Grand Mastership in 1722-23, but left – tongue and throat intact – in 1723, under ...”

“... was a popular conceit in the 1640s. For royalists like Reresby, those who took up arms against the king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament ...”

“... for ‘swashbuckling’ entrepreneurs, especially ones with Northern accents. When she first met James Hanson, his gentle Yorkshire lilt fascinated her almost as much as his millions. She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty ...”

“... policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert Rhodes James, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of Eden’s periods as Foreign Secretary: he claims that his Suez policy was absolutely justified and only wrecked by wrong-headed and pusillanimous Americans. The differing attitudes of the two ...”

“... By the time they get to Colchis, the Argonauts are in need of a bit of luck, and luckily the King’s daughter, Medea, forms an unsuitable attachment with Jason, betraying her father and her fatherland for the sake of a crush. Jason and his crew are pursued all the way up the Danube and into the Adriatic, but Medea comes to the rescue again, at last ...”

“... Earth​ aged millions of years over the course of the 18th century. In 1650 the Irish archbishop James Ussher had dated creation to around 6 p.m. on 22 October 4004 BCE. His estimate was based on a synthesis of sacred history and Persian, Greek and Roman myth, and so it satisfied both theologians and citizens of the Republic of Letters. A century ...”

“... One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence ...”

“... agreement, who acted uprightly and failed, seeps through, as does his dislike of De Valera and Sir James Craig. His good guys were duped and let down, while the last two died in their beds, full of Irish honours. Thus O’Connell and Parnell seem to react primarily to English stimuli, and the autonomous growth of Sinn Fein occurs in a chapter given over ...”