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“... that he mustn’t mention ‘that woman’s name’. David, or the Duke of Windsor as the lapsed Edward VIII is now to be called, is a benumbed and bitchy mummy’s boy (played here by Alex Jennings, a seasoned royal impersonator), and he spends the entirety of The Crown’s first series bumbling about and giggling at farting pugs. Some people imagine that ...”

“... and writer for hire, composing saints’ lives for a number of monasteries in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. He was commissioned to write the Life of Edith by Godgifu, the abbess of Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire. In his prologue, Goscelin explains that Godgifu and the other nuns told him about the events of Edith’s life, which were part of the ...”

“... but perhaps the best of all is ‘flowers’, which enters English via French after the Norman conquest. A variant of this word appears in several other languages. The Trotula, a widely circulated 12th-century collection of medical texts named after a female medical practitioner from Salerno and formerly attributed to her, was translated into 22 ...”

“... a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their father, and once liberated from much male ...”

“... has the younger generation of royals exactly endeared itself to the national headmistress. Prince Edward has never recovered from the fiasco of It’s a Knockout, Fergie’s foray into fiction was equally ill-advised, and if Marina Ogilvy had not existed, the tabloids would probably have invented her (which to some extent they undoubtedly did). Even the ...”

“... latest and most ambitious blockbuster. The year is 1549. Henry has been dead for two years, and Edward, his 11-year-old son, perches hesitantly on the throne with his uncle, the Lord Protector Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, pulling the strings. The country is in bad shape. War with Scotland is costly and ...”

“... Their ideology, however, is a cultural version of it. Until recently, as the Barbadan poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite says, West Indians ‘have been unable to afford the luxury of mythology’. Colonial history offers merely divisive images which can only provoke nostalgia, remorse, shame or rancour. Hence many West Indian writers have sought to re-align ...”

“... a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were well-known Jacobites, the family was well enough connected to ensure that, when he reached London, William was able to enter Westminster School and then Christ Church, Oxford, at both of which he shone ...”

“... console someone in trouble was assumed by Philip Henderson to have been intended to comfort either Edward or Georgiana Burne-Jones, while Kelvin believes that it may have been sent to Jane to commiserate with her on the end of her affair with Rossetti. Perhaps the most moving of the previously unpublished letters in this volume is a brief note of apology to ...”

“... If this goes on, Conservatives will soon have to choose their heroes from a short list of Montague Norman, Lord Eldon, Judge Jeffreys and (possibly) Bonar Law. We are now enjoying the fruits of the monetarist revolution, and the sans-culottes of monetarism seek to deflect criticism by denouncing the alleged follies of the Ancien Régime. So what took place ...”

“... pretension of the Terry Johnson-Nicholas Roeg film Insignificance; at the other, it inspired Norman Mailer’s ‘novel biography’ of a ‘possible’ Marilyn, which proved a triumph of intuitive speculation. Mailer leaned heavily on the first edition of Fred Lawrence Guiles’s book, suggesting that one day a great biography might be built on its ...”

“... valued, foreigner: ‘At home on the outskirts of Sheffield, the great steel town of Yorkshire, Mr Norman Pickering kissed his wife and daughter farewell …’ Would Bennett have ventured that (for us) redundant information as to Sheffield’s location and industry? But Bennett, of course, was a best-seller of a previous era and 80 per cent of his income was ...”

“... ended yet. On the contrary, the poetic scene is full of people who believe that by writing like Edward Thomas, on the one hand, or William Carlos Williams, on the other, they can recover or reconstitute innocence in their medium. And even a senior poet like Norman MacCaig, who is too old a hand to chase such a will of the ...”

“... in encapsulating personality. She found Ian Fleming ‘rather boring’, the future King Edward VIII a man of ‘wide-ranging interests’, and Norman Mailer, who married her elder daughter, ‘dynamic’ Her attendance at the 1936 Olympics enables her to tell us that Hitler had clammy hands, and that the von ...”

“... regionalism’ of Catalunya, Lombardy or Baden-Wuerttemberg. Indeed this nearly happened, with Edward Heath’s ‘Declaration of Perth’ in 1968, in favour of a devolved parliament. But in Scotland the private sector was no match for either Labour centralism or the rapacity of the City of London. The first fearfully complicated Labour’s attempt to ...”