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“... Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ‘feverishly’; for ‘physically’, read ‘psychically’ ... Mis-spelling, mis-punctuation and misquoting are much in evidence. In his parody of Ambrose ...”

“... be the media event of 1986,’ and outlines a programme: presentation of the Domesday facsimile to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Courts of Justice (Her Majesty will not lack for Domesday Books by the end of the year); jousting in Regents Park and Norwich; Domesday weeks in London, Winchester, Norwich ...”

“... the farmland of Crathie. The ‘scenery became prettier & prettier’, Queen Victoria wrote on her first trip to Balmoral, ‘& there is much agriculture & cultivation which gives a flourishing look to the country.’ Upper Deeside looks pastoral at first glance, but the bare boulders on the riverbanks speak of flood and force and the episodic violence of ...”

“... AT THE QUEEN’S BEDSIDE – She kept him talking for ten minutes ... Then a footman came to her aid.’ We are told that the man had shinned up the drainpipe, and thus managed to snatch his few brief moments of early-morning chit-chat with Her Majesty. It is not recorded that he was a historian, who would expect ...”

“... not his real father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by her servant John Brown, who must have ‘lifted his kilt’ on some unrecorded occasion. Everywhere, on tea-caddies and biscuit-tins, he looks proudly at images of his mother’s face. Samuel believes it, but we don’t, any more than we believe Pip’s great ...”

“... worse deal than blacks and homosexuals. In November the Princess Royal got a criminal record after her pet pit bull gored a child (the dog escaped the chop thanks to the Princess’s top-dollar brief). Even Prince William, once the press’s golden boy, was reported to have dispatched flunkeys to buy him porno mags from the local newsagent. Then came bruits of ...”

“... of medieval architectural motifs to modern shapes. Much of it survives in use at Windsor and if Her Majesty dips into this volume she may be puzzled by the stern tone in which Clive Wainwright endorses Pugin’s ‘quite proper’ renunciation of her ‘horrific’ furniture, most of which is considered too ...”

“... to come up with an answer, however, so I chose Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, and I chose to give her a book published in 2006, by the cultural historian Caroline Weber; it’s called Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution. It’s not that I think we’re heading for a revolution. It’s rather that I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll ...”

“... I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and unexpectedly rounded off by Ben, her middle son, who despite grief and nerves manages to say what his mother had meant to him and his two brothers. I couldn’t have spoken impromptu as he did and the congregation quite properly gave him (and Anne) a great round of applause. The boys then take ...”

“... combat. A soldier’s wife, for instance, far from the front, has a heart attack after he tells her what he’s going through. The book isn’t directly about fighting, or even about fear; to the extent it recounts the hardships of a soldier’s life, they’re pretty universal – boredom, cold, not enough booze – but with 21st-century Ukrainian ...”

“... form, a stroke on the shoulder with the flat of a sword’, which permits a dream moment when Her Majesty announces: ‘I now proclaim you rad. Arise Sir Damien.’) Wicked (‘excellent, great, wonderful’), you may notice, has avoided becoming a snappy monosyllable. It is, we are told after the definition, ‘a reversal of meaning’, which seems ...”

“... of these past existences and simultaneously enlisted a doting crowd of followers convinced of her psychic powers. It was Smith’s triumph – and her subsequent misfortune – to attract the attention of Théodore Flournoy (1854-1920), professor of psycho-physiology at the University of Geneva, friend of William James ...”

“... The story of Anna Anderson, the most plausible of the pretenders, fully discredited only when her blood samples were posthumously tested for DNA matches, is especially good fun. What is nauseating is the eagerness of a substantial section of the Western public to believe these people. Finally, Massie deals with the surviving members of the family, mostly ...”

“... convicted of wilfully producing a loaded crossbow with intent to use it to injure the person of her majesty, contrary to the Treason Act of 1842. Perhaps more important, as the authors recount, the 1696 Treason Act, following hard on the heels of the Bill of Rights, set up a series of procedural hedges, not cut down until 1945, which made treason ...”

“... Whom I would have done anything to please. Aquiline and aloof in the land of the button nose, her smile Made her seem a witch, my goddess, Too cool, too cold. She was my muse Because she hardly spoke a word. We used to pronounce her name to rhyme with Casbah, Mimicking ...”