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“... fables and fairy tales. His Pinocchio begins: Once upon a time there was . . . ‘A king!’ my little readers will say at once.   No, children, you’re wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood. In that sense Pinocchio has more in common with those postmodern children’s books in which nursery stories are upturned – The Stinky ...”

“... at Acre which probably inspired his famous constitutional experiments under Henry III. Sir Steven Runciman began his three-volume History of the Crusades, one of the truly great examples of English narrative historiography, with the implied question: do we regard the Crusades ‘as the most tremendous and romantic of Christian adventures or as the last ...”

“... who had the white pieces, castled on the queen’s side in an attempt to target Carlsen’s king by opening up the king’s side. This manoeuvre was a bit of a gamble. Though he had prepared a defence with an unusual rook move, he had exposed his king to Carlsen’s active ...”

“... standards in public life, a member of the Commission, MacGregor’s former cabinet colleague Tom King, signalled his approach to MacGregor’s conduct with the memorable sentence: ‘I will embarrass you now by saying I always thought you should be Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ MacGregor’s antics were governed by the prevailing Parliamentary ethic during ...”

“... all round the country, and the entertainer who had been spirited away somewhere between King’s Cross and Leeds had swarms of aspiring sound-alikes as far as the BBC transmitters could reach. The story of his disappearance made headlines in the national papers the following day. Posters went up in shop windows, and Peter Brough offered a reward of ...”

“... our attention, filling our minds with material worth pondering – including artists as diverse as Steven Spielberg and Derek Walcott. Yet at the same time she is distressed by some of the controlling notions or clichés of our time – ‘myths’ in the lowest sense, dangerous rotten explanations. The six lectures do not allow her the scope to work out some ...”

“... in the 1880s and 1890s. Orthography became important: Geoffrey or Jeffrey, Ann or Anne, Stephen or Steven. Girls’ names were especially given to whim and proliferation. In the 1930s, my mother was christened Doreen because a Russian acquaintance of my grandfather said that was the name of the nicest girl he had ever known. This nice Doreen seems to have made ...”

“... dissimilar to the Land of Oz). One evening in Westwood Village, after seeing Scorsese’s film The King of Comedy, I noticed Steven Spielberg coralled by rain in the cinema foyer, preferring multiple recognition to getting wet on his way to the parking lot. Sunday jogging between the smoggy carriage-ways of San Vicente came ...”

“... may not be your cup of tea, but you see what Eco means – and I suppose Arnie’s better than Steven Seagal if a hunk is a must. It’s true, and Eco acknowledges it, that there can only be intelligent guesses about the artefacts that have survived from before the invention of writing. The Venus of Willendorf may have been thought of as beautiful ...”

“... in the Tabernacle and The Ark Passes Over the Jordan (c.1896-1902) are clearly the source for Steven Spielberg’s Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. In The Last Temptation of Christ, Scorsese draws from several of Tissot’s crowded biblical scenes, just as D.W. Griffith (Intolerance) and Cecil B. DeMille (The ...”

“... logistics, finance, real estate, technology, entertainment and pharmaceuticals. Bezos is the king of logistics and technology; the queen of logistics, the Walmart heiress Ann Walton, owns the largest US-built motor yacht since the 1930s, Aquila. Yacht-owners on the East Coast include hedge fund managers and real estate tycoons and berth their boats in ...”

“... Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the Pope, the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela. And just as at the end of a fairy tale when the hero is rewarded for all his suffering by marrying the princess, he is married to a beautiful movie actress ...”

“... the rooftops of Sauchiehall Street might be Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, as drawn by Jessie M. King. For there is another character evident, one which so many of the visitors come to see: the sensuous, decorative excitement of the Art Nouveau. It is there in the treatment of the metalwork, in the tapering timber columns of the central first floor ...”

“... transparency; but he was also quick to see how cults of mystery were exploited by both priest and king to legitimate their power. There is no reason to assume that artists have been immune to this vice. The fact is that there is also something elusive and opaque about fine cooking or magnificent tennis-playing. Heston Blumenthal probably has no more idea of ...”

“... whale is a ‘tyrant’ who falls victim to the plots of little fishes, and finally a ‘slain king’ whose death goes unrevenged. In these respects he could be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and Hobbes, who knew Donne, may have ...”