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“... fond of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the ...”

“... In​ the middle of February 1348, King Edward III held a royal tournament in Reading. He probably held another one that month in Bury St Edmunds. He held another on 20 April in Lincoln, and three more in May, in Lichfield, Windsor and Eltham. He liked a tournament. His victory over France at Crécy two years earlier and England’s seizure of Calais were still fresh memories for him and the aristocratic chums who’d fought beside him ...”

“... stronger than his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose unobtrusive services to the evangelical cause played a key part in the course of Henrician reformation’. This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should ...”

“... ear, as British here means – but I’m being paranoid; he’s got some other axe to grind: King Arthur … Now there was a male mother, nourishing his men on his own blood, know what I’m saying? I don’t. Sir Bors, Gawain … The warrior’s gone dead in the modern male … I signal my wife let’s go, to no avail: Your wild man’s hurting … I ...”

“... with a different vernacular and a different elevated diction. The first of the 47 fictions in James Kelman’s Greyhound for Breakfast finds old Francis on a park bench in Glasgow, menaced by vaguely circling winos trying to cadge a cigarette. It was downright fucking nonsensical. And yet it was the sort of incident you could credit. You were sitting ...”

“... of Peleus and Thetis, and one from a century later showing Achilles fighting a duel with Memnon, king of the ‘Ethiopians’; as well as an amphora depicting Ajax, in full armour, passing one of the long days of the siege by playing a board game; another shows him falling on his sword. If you don’t remember many of these scenes from Homer, that’s ...”

“... more than anyone to make sure the city was ‘forgotten’. A Spartophile who admired the Spartan king Agesilaos to the point of hero worship, Xenophon detested the Thebans for the defeats they inflicted on Agesilaos himself and the Spartan army. He did his best to exclude them from Hellenica and to minimise their achievements. The historian Ephorus, his ...”

“... the most powerful woman in Europe, a defiantly hands-on female ruler whose marriage to Ferdinand, king of the lesser Spanish kingdom of Aragon, created the germ of modern Spain and marked the arrival of a formidable new power in world politics. Their conquest of the Moorish emirate of Granada and their deployment of the Inquisition, forced conversion ...”

“... the kings of Northumbria and Mercia and East Anglia and fell on Wessex over Twelfth Night 878, King Alfred ‘rallied his subjects’ (writes Edward James). ‘Rallied his subjects’ sounds more grown-up, more professional and political, than ‘burnt the cakes’ – though this is exactly the moment when ...”

“... which a cultural structure constructs a personage or an event as significant – the death of a king, say – Sahlins labels ‘instantiation’, the mediation by which an event modifies a structure (the death of Louis XVI) ‘totalisation’: ‘The claim is not that culture determines history, only that it organises it.’ Sahlins’s most celebrated ...”

“... like a Syrian. Having escaped from his worm-eaten cell, Melampous went on to cure the king’s impotence, ‘having learned’ from a vulture, a long-necked, hook-beaked bird, that when he was a boy the king’s father had threatened him with a gelding knife now embedded in the bark of a certain tree. Having ...”

“... long history indeed – more than a thousand years of continuous existence, so far. This, writes James Campbell, is the defining contrast between England and the other great European states. Despite some redrawing of county boundaries in 1974, most of the administrative geography of England remains today much as it was in the tenth and 11th centuries. No ...”

“... He was​ the greatest man since the Deluge.’ This assessment of Alexander von Humboldt by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, which Andrea Wulf quotes in her fine new biography, may be a slight exaggeration, but it reflects Humboldt’s extraordinary reputation among his contemporaries. On the centennial of his birth, 14 September 1869, elaborate celebrations were held all over the world; the front page of the New York Times was devoted to his achievements under a banner headline that said simply: HUMBOLDT ...”

“... legally enshrined, lethally enforced white supremacy to an end. Its national hero is Martin Luther King Jr. Far from giving way in the face of moral example and legal right, racial injustice rose to fever pitch during the 1960s. The third and deadliest Ku Klux Klan (succeeding the Southern Klan of the late 1860s and the national Klan of the 1920s) dynamited ...”

“... is too alert and understated to try to be wise after the event. Foden’s first novel, The Last King of Scotland, was equally restrained, relying on the tacit and equivocal. Its closed-mouthed narrator keeps tabs on his emotions and ignores much of his past. Nicholas Garrigan is a young doctor from Edinburgh, on secondment in Uganda and wet behind the ...”