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“... than the moon’s sphere’. This magical speed is echoed by Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen, who manage to live in a kind of perpetual half-light by constantly following the waning night. ‘We the globe can compass soon,’ remarks Oberon, ‘Swifter than the wandering moon.’ Here, in part, is Empson’s response to these lines: As ...”

“... Martin Loughlin arguably gets it in one: ‘By establishing the principle that acts of the king had an official character exercisable through certain forms, the charter constituted a landmark in the emergence of English governing arrangements.’ What followed was, as he says, messy. It took a long time for king and ...”

“... lived in at least thirty parts of the United States, not to mention Cuba, Paris and the Riviera. Stephen Crane’s birthplace is now a children’s playground in New Jersey, William Faulkner’s a Presbyterian parsonage. The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States, from which these titbits come, provides further unwitting refutations of its ...”

“... of public good.This defence had been long in gestation. The conservative jurist James Fitzjames Stephen had proposed it in his draft criminal code: ‘A person is justified in exhibiting disgusting objects, or publishing obscene books, papers, writings, prints, pictures, drawings, or other representations, if their exhibition or publication is for the ...”

“... It is worth stating a few facts about Stephen Tennant, the subject of this excellent biography by Philip Hoare, in case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces ...”

“... dead except for Empson and myself) and was delighted at how well we all got on together. ‘King of the Cats’ (to use Yeats’s phrase about himself), to whom we all paid homage, was Basil Bunting, now in his eighties, who wrote his masterpiece, Briggflatts, at the age of 65 on returning to the North of England, after many years of adventurous Middle ...”

“... Frederic Harrison once climbed Mont Blanc and found Leslie Stephen on the top. Not an improbable location for the encounter of two eminent Victorians: and they might equally have met in George Eliot’s drawing-room. Whereas Stephen was much the more distinguished mountaineer, Harrison probably knew George Eliot better: he helped her work out the legal plot of Felix Holt, a service for which she may have owed him more gratitude than we need to feel ...”

“... to be discharged carefully. ‘You are his shadow,’ he warned Buckingham, and since ‘the king himself is above the reach of his people,’ his shadow could be stamped on instead. Few favourites lasted a reign, let alone a regime change. As Sir Henry Wotton said, ‘the state of a favourite is at the best but a tenant-at-will.’ Favourites could find ...”

“... if’ – as if there were another world with such values. A great ‘as if’ hangs over King Lear, where Lear addresses the naked figure of Edgar, who is feigning madness, in words that bring us back to the ‘I’ of the ultimate human condition, and sees himself in Edgar: ‘Thou art unaccommodated man, the thing itself.’ Lear, however, even on ...”

“... aimed at achieving just such a compromise between Iraq and Kuwait. President Mubarak of Egypt, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and King Hussein of Jordan were all convinced that the rising tension between Baghdad and Kuwait City could be defused. Saddam Hussein proved them wrong. As at every other defining moment in his ...”

“... Fiction’, ‘who was in the slot-machine racket, decided to go straight and became a laundromat king, sent his daughter to Bennington, where she married a poet-in-residence or a professor of modern linguistic philosophy ... People speak of the lack of tradition or of manners as having a bad effect on the American novel, but the self-made man is a far richer ...”

“... immediately after the conquest of Lydia by Cyrus, the aggressive and imperially expansive young king of Persia – the Greeks of Asia Minor, who had previously lived under the easy-going rule of Croesus the Lydian, and had received a sharp rebuff when they tried to get a similar deal from Cyrus, approached the Spartans for a protective alliance. The ...”

“... trading-floor is fully up and running, but the process begins back in Ulysses. ‘The problem,’ Stephen tells Buck Mulligan after Buck scolds him for trying to trade Shakespearean theory for a bit of English coin, ‘is to get money.’ Should they solicit it, he sarcastically asks, from the milkwoman who’s just passed by? She takes money from them and ...”

“... a concern that appears in the Declaration of Independence as one of the accusations against the King: ‘He has incited domestic insurrections amongst us.’ It is the old guilty fear that a foreign power would turn the natural resentment of the American black against his captors (in 1775 Lord Dunmore had threatened to free and arm the slaves ‘and reduce ...”

“... and lies which is called representative government’. It is set in the reign of the ‘Citizen King’ Louis-Philippe, brought to power by the Revolution of July 1830: France has a constitutional monarchy, a Chamber of Deputies, a legal republican party, a free press, and some people have the right to vote. Hence the need for hypocrisy and lies. The Prince ...”