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“... prescriptive stuff. Berger’s bleat drew a warm seconding letter from the reliably reactionary Elizabeth JaneHoward and her friend Sybille Bedford. If Berger had slyly blamed all the mayhem onto ‘the Rushdie affair’, these two went him one better in the business of culpability. The violence was not the result ...”

“... some of his rivals. Charles Brandon was part of a coterie of special favourites, with Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvett and Henry Guildford. In 1512, the young king went to war with France. Charles was given command of troops for a sea attack on Brittany, to be led by Edward Howard. With Thomas Knyvett on board, the Regent ...”

“... other films, a more or less obligatory practice these days. Giles’s mad mother lives at Castle Howard (a.k.a. Brideshead), and at one point Johnny the psycho is about to blow the lock off a door with a shotgun when he thinks better of it and instead smashes in one of the panels with a handy statuette of the Virgin. He then fools the audience by not ...”

“... novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth JaneHoward, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He ...”

“... candidate: a translation of a mystical meditation into English from French made by Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen. The Glass of the Sinful Soul, as she called it, was not an original work, but a good pupil’s exercise, undertaken in 1544 at the age of 11 as part of her lessons. A long prayer by Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, it was ...”

“... writer. Much of the recent debate has centred on that ‘reason’. But unlike Catherine Howard, the other Henrician wife to get the chop, and Jane Seymour, who died giving birth to the badly needed male heir which this whole story, at one level, was about, Anne Boleyn was no Tudor bimbo, no mindless ...”

“... Do novelists come nicer than Elizabeth Taylor? Her mother died of politeness – she developed appendicitis over Christmas, and didn’t want to interrupt the doctor’s holiday – but rather than renounce good manners on the spot, her biographer Nicola Beauman writes, Taylor ‘cared about good manners very much indeed’ to the end of her days ...”

“... turn. There were scandals enough in centuries past, from the sneaky little adulteries of Katherine Howard to the junketings of the Prince Regent to the modern-day mischief of Mrs Simpson. But a new world began, I think, in 1980, with the discovery that Diana, the future Princess of Wales, had legs. You will remember how the young Diana taught for a few hours a ...”

“... two new houses in 1537 (one for monks, one for nuns) to pray for his soul and that of his wife Jane Seymour, but within two years he decided that he had enough prayers elsewhere, and dissolved them too. The problem for monasteries was that many devout Catholic Christians took their cue from the failed monk Erasmus, whose reaction to his failure was to ...”

“... the 1560s to the present time. I had not fully appreciated, for example, the extent to which Queen Elizabeth, both personally and through her ministers, agents and ambassadors, manipulated and controlled the affairs of Scotland ... In 1603, when James VI became James I of England, Scotland lost her resident monarch. Little more than a century later, ‘a ...”

“... may even have paid.The film had already started, Errol Flynn flirting with Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth while the usherette showed us down the aisle and before we had even sat down the man was pinching me and remarking on my nice chubby legs. This seemed fairly boring to me as, so far as I was concerned, they were just legs, but I put up with it for the ...”

“... Henry wished for his daughter. After his marriage to Anne Boleyn and the birth of their daughter, Elizabeth, Mary was sent to join the household of the infant princess. There, she was surrounded by connections of the Boleyn queen. Margaret was superfluous; curtly, Henry wrote her off as a fool. If he had trusted her once, he no longer did so. The prestige of ...”

“... Bacon​ was 39 when he tipped up at the club in 1948. He was introduced to it by Brian Howard, the poet and journalist who is Miles Malpractice in Vile Bodies and ‘two-thirds’ of Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (the other third, Evelyn Waugh said, was Harold Acton). Howard is now best known for a ...”

“... underappreciated in the States, rarely goes beyond perplexity and adulation. A typical sentence is Howard Moss’s ‘How Schuyler manages to be absolutely truthful and an obsessed romantic at the same time is his secret.’ Well, perhaps the critic should have tried harder to get it out of him. Lee Harwood in his afterword to Schuyler’s Last Poems enthuses ...”

“... had triumphed in Worcestershire, but Mary died only a year after Dean Hawford. Her successor, Elizabeth I, once more turned religion to Protestantism, including the closure of the few monasteries, nunneries and friaries that Mary’s Catholic restoration had begun to coax back into life. The dissolution of the monasteries is an old tale oft told: the ...”