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“... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...”

“... a single non-royal person was common, even commoner than either genuinely personal monarchy, the king his own minister, or conciliar, collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who ...”

“... Isaac Casaubon, Mayerne sought, and received, sanctuary at the court of the British philosopher-king James VI and I, where erudition was prized over orthodoxy – or indeed decorum. England was to be Mayerne’s de facto home for the rest of his life. The wars of religion had injected a crucial element of paranoia into court life. Kings and leading ...”

“... Victoria Nuland upheld the ban. Yet by September 2014 he was being shown round the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington DC by Barack Obama, and in June 2016 he addressed a joint session of Congress on the subject of his and America’s shared ‘philosophy of freedom’.Rupert Murdoch anointed Modi as India’s ‘best leader with the best policies ...”

“... Scarborough as his prizes. But while ‘John Paul Jones won the propaganda war,’ the historian David Pendleton told me, ‘much of that is down to his famous line, which he almost certainly never said, and the fact he brought the war to British shores. The convoy was carrying a cargo essential to the British war efforts. The Serapis and the Countess of ...”

“... of Surrealism during the war years (he also launched a journal there, with Duchamp, Ernst and David Hare, called VVV). And though Bretonian Surrealism was opposed to abstraction, it helped American artists like Jackson Pollock develop an automatist gesturalism that was more expressive of the unconscious than any Surrealist dreamscape. Such was also its ...”

“... it as a transit camp for captured enemy pilots. The US army took it over in 1946, renamed it Camp King and used it for ‘special interrogations’, involving torture, beatings and drug injections, carried out by Counterintelligence Corps officers known as ‘rough boys’. The disposal of bodies was, one CIA officer recalled, ‘no problem’.The ‘rough ...”

“... had called him a ‘slave’. Asked whether he knew that Foucault had been named by the King as Dumesle’s successor as Intendant, Giraud replied that he did not, and that even if he had been told so he would not have believed it, since Foucault had been dressed in plain grey and not in uniform. Asked whether he was not aware of the laws which ...”

“... to free a group of nine hostages – the British Consul among them – who had been taken by the King of Abyssinia, Theodore II, to his fortress at Magdala in a fit of pique after Queen Victoria had refused his pleas for help, as a Christian, in his wars with his Muslim neighbours. The hostages were rescued, albeit at vast expense (the final bill for the ...”

“... it, the challenge of the territorial state was ‘to make the state, rather than the person of the king, the object of constitutional and strategic concern, without permitting the people to claim the state as their own. “My land”, “my country”, but not “my nation”.’ The territorial state was unable in the end, however, to prevent the emergence of ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York ...”

“... for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white ...”

“... what was to be done if, for example, a feudal tenant ‘happen to fail of his wit’. (Answer: the King had not only to protect the inheritance, but also to ensure that the profits were used to support both the lunatic and his family ‘competently’. Any surplus profits were retained for the tenant’s use, should he recover.) Historical myths are there to ...”

“... reader a recognisable stock character. This is Ronald Reagan, here renamed President O’Reilly. (David Lodge’s version, ‘Ronald Ruck’, was funnier.) D.M. Thomas offers a farcical interview with President O’Reilly in which the old man is so confused that he can only answer the question before the last:     ‘What is your outlook on ...”