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“... all Jewish. Eisner has changed their names, but a glossary at the back provides the key: ‘Jack King’ (né Klingensteiner) is based on Jack Kirby (né Jacob Kurtzberg), co-creator of Captain America and The Fly; ‘Ken Corn’ is based on Bob Kane (né Kahn), creator of Batman. The bespectacled Jews in their workshop, manufacturing superheroes under ...”

“... with an extraordinary feat of imagination. The utterances of Uriel and Madimi, of El and Il and King Carmara and scores of other spirits, are not voicings from the spirit-world, but improvised dramatic monologues performed by Kelley. Most of it is high-sounding esoteric flannel, but often the words have a strange rolling beauty: ‘I will hold up his house ...”

“... proving himself a cunning ‘politician’ in the precise pejorative sense used by Shakespeare in King Lear: ‘Get thee glass eyes,/And, like a scurvy politician, seem/To see the things thou dost not.’ So while the message of these texts is clear enough, their provenance makes them hard to interpret. The proportion of truth and invention in them cannot be ...”

“... In Smart City, Donald Trump is a good thing. He makes the faultline visible. The gold-topped King Ubu of the internet has been generous enough to embody all the creeping horrors of corporate opportunism, all the self-serving, reflex mendacity of political operators with a more emollient pitch. The man is visible. He is loud enough to be heard across ...”

“... boys; both Jewish; both were ladled with mother-love as sons, Mailer fussed over as ‘the little king’ and Podhoretz doted on by the women in his family as destiny’s darling, cooing over ‘the blue of my eyes, at the thick curliness of my hair, at the streak of grey on its side (proof, they said, echoing an ancient superstition, that I was among the ...”

“... and people drop their hard-earned cash into his plastic cup. For dirty, greasy-haired Dave, 19, is king of the hard-faced professional beggars working Central London.’These reports – with their penny-dreadful conflation of begging with theft, social security fraud and gang-violence – have taken their toll in public wariness. People are increasingly ...”

“... not stop bitter enemies in the Party from becoming important regional figures, like Biedenkopf (‘King Kurt’) in Saxony. The SPD has never allowed the same personalisation of authority. When it has been in power, the pattern has always been a diarchy – Brandt and Herbert Wehner, or Schmidt and Brandt – with the Chancellor flanked by a powerful and ...”

“... remarks, ‘legal power is, of course, constitutionally vested in the absolute sovereign – the King in Parliament. What makes this country comparatively free, therefore, is the fact that this theoretically omnipotent entity is restrained by custom or opinion from behaving as such. It is clear that what matters is not the form of these restraints on power ...”

“... rest of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... what used to be the valley of the Fleet River, which flowed into the Thames from the direction of King’s Cross. In 1863, Farringdon became one terminus in the world’s first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, the other being Paddington. It’s been running ever since: 142 years of complete strangers squeezed into boxes, propelled under the ...”

“... ends. Her tale of scholarly intrigue and Cold War defamation finds a useful counterpoint in Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (1979). In this account, Moby-Dick is not about what 20th-century scholars thought America should become, but about what it became in any case. Ishmael warns us against ‘scouting at ...”

“... to make it clear to everyone how much you want to win. “You have to want it,” he said, like Michael Jordan demanding the ball in the final moments of a game.’ But when provoked, he reaches for a different analogy. On his last overseas trip as president, Obama complains to Rhodes about how he was let down. ‘He couldn’t believe the election was ...”

“... arrival, when the non-Aryan proportion in its membership had seemed to many unnecessarily high.’ Michael Barber, Powell’s earlier biographer, who first pointed out these passages, sensibly did not make too much of them. Like offhand dismissals of democracy, casual expressions of antisemitism were comme il faut in the upper classes of the period, a lightly ...”

“... in 1875, and known for his charisma, cunning and strategic skills, was dubbed ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He was brought down in 1890, having been named by William O’Shea as co-respondent in a divorce action, and died the following year.) It didn’t even look as though Sinn Féin had captured the public imagination. In opening his tobacco shop ...”