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“... the wider political audience which the newsbooks were reaching – a point also explored by Sara Pearl in one of the many excellent essays brought together by David Lindley as The Court Masque. Of course, while particular issues or episodes might split politicians down the middle, there was no two-party system in Early Modern England. The friendship between ...”

“... as three stories written in different periods of his life’. The second of these stories, ‘A King Listens’, describes a monarch sitting motionless on his throne, tormented by the noises which interrupt the sepulchral silence of his palace. In the third, ‘The Name, the Nose’, the story of a Parisian rake in pursuit of an elusive scent (a vein mined ...”

“... 1941 that the Japanese naval air force had attacked the US Pacific Fleet at a location called ‘Pearl Harbor’, no one on Hitler’s staff could find it on the map.The​ decision-makers of the 1940s have many active friends among the historians and writers of our time: defenders and descendants still wedded to ‘their’ service and its traditions, to ...”

“... on morale: it persuaded the majority that everyone was in this together when they read of the king being served spam. Of course, there were some inequalities, and an enterprising black market (Private Walker in Dad’s Army); and I still remember (or think I do) the farmers in Staffordshire who grudgingly took me and my mother in as evacuees towards the ...”

“... of its sort in English – means we know the 15th-century Pastons better than we know any medieval king or queen. The letters, first published in 1787, revealed a family on the make. Clement Paston, a yeoman farmer born at the end of the 14th century, set his son up as a lawyer. The lawyer bought land, and his son John inherited more, including Caister ...”

“... and even transvests Charles I into a baroque Margaret Thatcher, closing seven hundred pages on the King with the words: ‘He believed some principles worth adhering to whatever the repercussions – and well, he may even have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the ...”

“... he may not have been for a long time.’ When Japan attacked the Philippines, four hours after Pearl Harbor, the sceptics were proved right. The handful of B17S, lined up wingtip to wingtip, were destroyed on the ground. The Japanese landed unopposed. Manila was abandoned without a fight. MacArthur, with his family and President Quezón, withdrew to the ...”

“... fluctuations in the magnetic field, the minute shifts in air pressure, the winking apertures of pearl light above the morning ocean. Now it appears we need our weather-analysts more than our shrinks. Migratory depressions, ‘lows’, like the ever-increasing columns of out-patients and inadequates wandering the streets, have their life cycles, their ...”

“... Richard Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the building of Peterborough, 184 from the Norman Conquest, 79 from the ...”

“... you are gentleman,’ Morgan said.   No one moved.   Morgan went over to Edward King, head of the Union Trust, and drew him to the table.   ‘There’s the place, King,’ he said, ‘and here’s the pen.’ King signed. The other presidents followed suit ... The ...”

“... the following from Reynolds’s ‘Thirteen Days in a Northern City’: Like most people, the King goes to the mountains to ski, normally driving, but when cars were banned during the Oil Crisis he took a tram for the first time. At the door, loaded with skis, he asked the conductor: ‘Do I have to pay?’ Admittedly, Reynolds avoids the worst ...”

“... Lekachman, ‘a helplessly awkward intellectual sort of kid’, was drafted into the Navy after Pearl Harbor: Our first operation was in Guam. That was the first time I saw a dead Japanese. He looked pitiful, with his thick glasses. He had a sheaf of letters in his pocket. He looked like an awkward kid who’d been taken right out of home to this miserable ...”

“... source-hunting and explorations of Eliot’s use of Grail mythology or Wagner or the Fisher King of the kind one finds in Cleanth Brooks’s 1939 study of The Waste Land. ‘T.S. Eliot and Obsessional Neurosis’, Jarrell planned to call it, and one can surmise the argument he intended to make from the paragraph he devotes to Eliot in a lecture of 1962 ...”

“... more important than they were or that we know more about them than we do.But with the reign of King Bluebeard, you don’t have to pretend. Women, their bodies, their reproductive capacities, their animal nature, are central to the story. The history of the reign is so graphically gynaecological that in the past it enabled lady novelists to write about sex ...”

“... entry in his notebook of handy English phrases: Pigeons: homing – working – fantails pearl-eyed tumbler – shortfaced – performing tumblers trumpeters – squeakers blue, red turbits – Jacobins baldpates – pearl eyes, – tumbles well high flying performing tumblers splashed – rough legged grouse ...”