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“... or educational, most grown-ups make only occasional nostalgic excursions into the country of Peter Rabbit, and then only as part of the ritual induction of their children into reading. In contrast, the young have always been efficient rievers of stories from all sources, and have carried off such literary booty as pleased them. Now that children have ...”

“... VIII, ‘He has the secret of youth in the prime of age,’ whereas Ernest Simpson just called him Peter Pan.) In contributing The Duchess of Windsor, Diana Mosley has set herself a harder task than most. Her aims are good or at least interesting; their realisation was impossible. There is bound to be an element of moral judgment in any account of the ...”

“... The​ king died and then the queen died’ is a story, as E.M. Forster told us long ago. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot. Another plot, a little more reticent about causality, would be: ‘The king died and the queen married his brother ...”

“... of Norfolk or Suffolk or the Earls of Derby and Shrewsbury had chosen to be disloyal to their king, the ‘pilgrims’ would probably have been successful. The King is, of course, another crucial factor in this story. In recent years there has been a tendency to portray Henry VIII as a man easily led by people like ...”

“... as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness ...”

“... smiling tolerance among his menaces of damnation’. Recent writing on the English Reformation by Peter Lake, Nicholas Tyacke and others has exploded Eliot’s account of Andrewes as the voice of a tranquil via media, a man whose confidence sprang from the settled possession of ‘a formed visible church behind him’. His early religious opinions took shape ...”

“... there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr ...”

“... pal, who played it around the clock. It sold half a million copies. ‘Rocket 88’ is regarded by Peter Guralnick, among others, as the first true example of rock ’n’ roll. ‘I always thought he was kind of a nut,’ Jack Clement, who worked for Sun as a producer and engineer, said of Phillips. ‘I always thought he was full of shit. And he was. And ...”

“... Levy’s latest book, a collection of his newspaper articles, reveals the man once dubbed ‘King Foodie’ in all his fullness. He is – and he knows it – a mild snob and a name-dropper, bumptious, provocative, opinionated and flippant. But there is even more to Levy than meets the eye. Behind the facetiousness, there is genuine wit, as in his ...”

“... 1957 exegesis of the monarch’s ‘two bodies’ and the political theology of the king’s person as an incarnation of the state. Recently, however, voices have been raised in dissent against the swollen ‘body’ industry, notably by Terry Eagleton, for whom the endless discussion of the body remains a tiresome and dubiously fruitful ...”

“... daughter’s homework on the Roman villa at Fishbourne, with its murals of Cogidubnus, the client king installed to ensure the smooth functioning of the Roman Empire’s trade interests (here nicknamed ‘Compradorius’), and equally in ‘the here/and now of orange juice and bedtime cocoa’. It appears more viciously in the media apparatus behind Comic ...”

“... is a man caught in a momentary spotlight: the famous scene of doubt and resolution is told, in the King James translation, in about 150 words. But here was something longer, more circumstantial, more actual – a twenty-year mission, a journey through broadly identifiable places around and across the southern tip of India. Could the story be true? And if it ...”

“... least one person on the staff who was either a security services officer, an agent or an informer. Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame, a former MI5 officer whose evidence has to be treated cautiously, says that Cecil King, the Daily Mirror boss, ‘was a long-time agent of ours’. Perhaps. Or did Mr ...”

“... the world: he wanted fame – and yet he did not want to be tainted with success. This is James King, who despite having already written the life of another mad poet, William Cowper, is ploddingly rational. The only occasion on which the two poets met was about twenty years after Cowper died, when he came to Blake in a dream. According to some marginalia in ...”

“... and religion. For a balanced view, you would almost do better with Thomas Hughes. Alfred Smyth’s King Alfred the Great may be highly contentious but it is a formidable work. At this point a confession of interest has to be made. The most original feature of the book is Smyth’s dismissal, as a later forgery, of Asser’s Life, on which all earlier ...”