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“... preparation for conflict as a pleasure. His construction of a small royal navy – with the Great Michael, for a short time the largest warship in Europe, at its heart – was testimony to his financial resources and his interest in military technology. Henry’s response was to build a slightly larger ship, a decision marking the start of his own long-term ...”

“... swooned over Cary Grant in An Affair to Remember, and sung and danced with Yul Brynner in The King and I. This is a way of saying she wasn’t the twenty-year-old girl of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, had not lived what James called ‘a small, smothered life’, and was most unlikely not to have seen herself full-length in a mirror before she got to the ...”

“... and a nameless son bearing the corpse of the father he has just killed, both of them watched by a king who, having inherited the crown from his never-to-be-equalled father, has now disinherited his own son, thereby occasioning the battle. Outside the obsessively patrilineal English histories, trouble between fathers and daughters seems just as common, whether ...”

“... first read or a return. The Open Road and Ennemonde are tours de force in their own fashion, and A King Alone is a classic by any standard. A King Alone is the earliest of these three books, first published in France (the place that doesn’t exist) in 1947. The psychological climate of the recent war is everywhere in ...”

“... The​ king died and then the queen died’ is a story, as E.M. Forster told us long ago. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. Another plot, a little more reticent about causality, would be: ‘The king died and the queen married his brother ...”

“... me and what he thought. Was he stuffing a goat, hitting the 3 star, or letters home. Minos, Minos King of Crete. I tried on a Cretan accent, did that all the hair up all the hair down thing they do there. I thought of the word Argive – or were we the Argives? Perhaps if we lost – and how could we fail to lose, how could anyone hold out against him, he’s ...”

“... Memory is a large part of it. Herodotus tells us the name of Leonidas, the king of Sparta who died at Thermopylae in 480 BC, not exactly holding the multitudinous Persians at bay but at least showing how it might be done. Herodotus also says he has ‘learned the names of all the three hundred’ Spartans who fell with their king ...”

“... is old and always violent, and in a favourite modern version acquires a dark particular twist. The king must die but he also has to collude with, even create his assassin. Early on in Bradley Cooper’s first film as a director, a new rendering of A Star Is Born, Cooper himself, playing a crumbling rock/country legend, sings a weary, winsome number about ...”

“... degree closer to David I than Balliol. The Brus claim was rejected in 1292 and Balliol was crowned king of Scots. Undeterred, and incensed by Edward I’s success in having his own son declared Balliol’s heir, the Brus family continued to pursue its claim to the throne, gathering powerful allies with substantial military resources. After Balliol was ...”

“... It were a delicate stratagem,’ muses King Lear at one point during his great mad scene:                             to shoe A troop of horse with felt: I’ll put’t in proof; And when I have stol’n upon these sons-in-law. Then kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill! R.A. Foakes and Brian Vickers, both approaching retirement after reigning for nearly thirty years in the upper reaches of Shakespeare studies, aren’t feeling entirely charitable towards their heirs either, although on the evidence of their new reflections on the state of that divided kingdom, Foakes is rather less malicious than his Shakespearean avatar, and Vickers rather less stealthy ...”

“... politics. Lee says only whites ask him about the meaning of the two quotations, from Martin Luther King and Malcolm, at the end of Do the Right Thing, and only whites need to ask, he claims, why the uncommitted character played by Lee himself chooses to start a riot by hurling a rubbishbin through the window of the pizzeria. The quotation from ...”

“... of each House (1774), and more recently the Henry Irving Shakespeare (1892), or the versions of King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Hamlet released by Oberon Books in conjunction with productions by English Touring Theatre (2002-7) – this one does not claim the authority of specific recent performances for the texts it presents. Although its ...”

“... for luxury brands seems to owe something to Wheatley’s style). He proudly related that the king, a professed fan of his fiction, had asked to see a copy of every report he wrote: all in all, a good war. His involvement in the world of spooks continued after the war when the IRD – the outfit for whom the dying Orwell prepared his list of suspected ...”

“... The legend of King Arthur must be the most enduring legacy of the Middle Ages. Everyone knows it: children, scholars, readers of comic books, movie-makers. The scenes and motifs associated with it – Excalibur, the Round Table, the adultery of Guinevere, the return to Avalon – are more familiar than anything linked to real medieval kings ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely ...”