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“... the Low Countries. But it includes Ireland, a lordship and, after 1541, a kingdom, subject to the king of England and legally (according to English law) ‘annexed’ to England. This was a very peculiar kingdom indeed. There was no Irish crown, no Irish coronation (with those limiting oaths and undertakings), and no English ...”

“... performing a battle scene. The most famous of them was Peter Lobengula, said to be the son of King Lobengula of Matabeleland (now Zimbabwe), who attracted considerable attention by marrying a white woman called Kitty Jewell. Troupes of minstrels toured Britain, creating a genre so popular that it remained a staple of television light entertainment until ...”

“... ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess’s octogenarian ...”

“... Jackie said it in a thoughtful, reflective way; he showed the side that made Charles a great king afterwards.’ A year later MacGowran made his London debut as the Young Covey in The Plough and the Stars, becoming friends with its author, Sean O’Casey. In 1956 in London he played – to much critical acclaim from critics such as Kenneth Tynan and ...”

“... servants only two were fit to wait on him; he himself was very ill and very tired. He wrote to the King, saw that his men and invalids were paid and looked after, and then went straight home to San Lucar, which he had never wished to leave. On being offered the command in the first place he had asked to be excused ‘for I know by the small experience I have ...”

“... works blowing over from Newington Butts. She was 77 years old, a relic of the days of mad King George. She had outlived both her husband and her son. It was her daughter-in-law Caroline, now married to a clerk named Eastwood, who was with her when she died. There were no obituaries. It was a small event in a small corner of the metropolis; a drop in ...”

“... of Commander Crabb – shows exactly how seriously the Intelligence gang takes prime ministers. Anthony Eden, who was then prime minister, gave specific instructions that there was to be no intelligence surveillance of Bulganin and Khrushchev, in the course of their celebrated visit to Britain. At once, MI5 ordered the bugging of the suite at Claridge’s ...”

“... the jollity and schoolboy humour and comic French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI went to see it with Queen Elizabeth shortly after their accession; and a few months later old Queen Mary – a true Aunt Edna type – came, too. That evening a slight hush fell on the house when Rex Harrison described Diana the man-eater as ‘a ...”

“... suddenly, effortlessly, fall into the very cadences of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘In Homer’s time, a King could go out to plough his land and build his bed of giant timbers.’ Her prose is usually ravishing, sometimes breathtaking. The entire section titled ‘Pasticceria and the Apulian Baroque’ is composed according to the principles of the startling ...”

“... of the Somalia ceasefire emerged within days of its initialling, with the death of Marine Anthony Botello in the capital on 25 January. On the same day, the Pax Americana was also breached in Kismayo, where as many as ten Somalis were killed, and forty wounded, during clashes involving United States helicopters. They destroyed six technicals, an ...”

“... across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a ...”

“... off every now and again in a chauffeur-driven car provided by the Post to check whether the ex-king was leaving via the nearby Lympne airport. (He had sailed off in a destroyer.) It was appropriate that Deedes should end up with Waugh in Abyssinia, providing the model for William Boot. Anyone who remembers how, on Lord Copper’s orders, Boot is outfitted ...”

“... or academics with high aesthetic ideals and dodgy personal histories, like Victor Maskell, the Anthony Blunt-ish hero of The Untouchable, or the murderer Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence, or the unnamed narrators of the string of novels which followed. These men are set apart from other people by a massive sense of self-worth and a coldly ...”

“... making a career around Larkin is that the output is quite small, and others, Andrew Motion and Anthony Thwaite, have already picked the meat out of the life. What’s left after a couple of books of literary criticism wouldn’t amount to a serious life’s work for a mayfly. Or shouldn’t. There is, however, an unmistakable reverential quality in the ...”

“... constant and often irritating parallels drawn from modern Oxbridge. A later master of Balliol, Anthony Kenny, drew more useful parallels in his 1985 study of Wyclif: ‘Contemporary Oxford philosophy resembles the philosophy of Wyclif’s day more than it matches the Oxford of the 19th century or the Paris of the 20th century. Like Wyclif’s ...”