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“... that anchor Atlanta’s claim to world fame – the homes of Margaret Mitchell, Martin Luther King Jr and Coca-Cola. Seen through Rutheiser’s ironic, cold eye these nodes mark the fault lines of a disintegrative urban history. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, the most popular movie and, after the Bible, the best-selling book of all time, is a ...”

“... and others who hoped, that the Queen might outlive her eldest son, so that he would never become king at all. Such might have been the gloomy midcareer appraisal of His Royal Highness Prince Albert Edward, later (and briefly) King Edward VII. And it is not coincidental that many of the same things are now being said about ...”

“... a sperm whale’s penis? This is one of the many intrepid expeditions undertaken by Richard King in the course of researching Ahab’s Rolling Sea. His book, like Moby-Dick itself, tells you everything you ever wanted to know about whales but were too ashamed to ask. The fact that the sperm whale’s penis, or ‘grandissimus’, is four and a half feet ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... John White is famous for the drawings he made in the late 1580s which record aspects of the North American littoral: its geography, its inhabitants, their dress, customs and dwellings, and the birds, plants and animals found there. Seventy-five of White’s drawings, along with navigational instruments, maps, books and relics of 16th-century exploration are on show in A New World, an exhibition at the British Museum until 17 June ...”

“... laws, to fight a duel’. The editorial lamented that affairs of state should be entrusted by the king ‘to persons whose intemperate passions were so little under the control of reason’. So it proved. Canning recovered from his wound but both men had to resign public office. No glamour or romance attached to the incident, which was regarded as ...”

“... of his expenses claims. Now he discovers that there is an article by one of his predecessors, John Major, which attacks him in highly personal terms. He decides he must ring the Telegraph’s editor to put the record straight. He has to do this on a train to Bradford, where he is due to unveil a memorial in honour of a local police officer, Sharon ...”

“... In January​ 1904, King Leopold II of Belgium was invited to Berlin to attend a birthday dinner for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The two monarchs were seated next to each other and everything was going nicely until the Kaiser suddenly brought up the question of a possible future French attack on Germany. In the event of a war between Germany and France, Wilhelm explained, he would expect the Belgians to side with Germany ...”

“... are retired you can’t blame anyone else if there is a vacancy around you. ‘Every old man is a King Lear,’ said Goethe, and Lear planned a highly self-regarding scenario for his life after he gave up work. What about an old woman, what stereotype does she resemble? Larkin would mutter about ratbags, but then Larkin got a lot of fun out of bemoaning the ...”

“... Melbourne in the days of what now seems the old innocent Australia, when there were pictures of King George in every living-room, and on winter nights ‘mallee roots’ were burnt in the open grate. Distant and unpeopled except by Aborigines, Mallee had become a desert owing to the extraction of these giant old eucalypts, and a dark red rain from its ...”

“... powers. Cut Tennyson and Browning off at that age and we would have neither The Idylls of the King nor The Ring and the Book. A more convincing explanation of his poetic block is found in a late conversation poem, ‘Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoon’. Wandering with a friend in Hyde Park, Arnold asks why there are so few ‘real successes’ in ...”

“... as a narrative by rendering a complex story comprehensible. Ludendorff, Von Kluck, Joffre, Sir John French, King Albert of Belgium – all come, in Tuchman’s portrayal, to embody the characteristics of the nations to which they belong. We feel that we are seeing a modern morality play re-enacted before our ...”

“... wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing knee breeches when meeting the king, except MacDonald, who was ‘very dignified and distinguished in his Privy Counsellor’s full dress uniform’. When MacDonald died in 1937, Channon said he had been happy ‘only after 1931, when he had carted his old followers, and could breathe freely ...”

“... be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such extra-legal power.In 1685 the Duke of York, who had been brought up in ...”

“... 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 ...”