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“... celebrations last year for another milestone of Stuart English prose composition, the King James Bible, and although I was surprised by the large amount of public interest shown in that commemoration, I doubt whether the Prayer Book will have such an impact. Many will regard it simply as a tribal occasion for a particular Christian ...”

“... on a single day at Verden on the River Aller in northern Saxony, on the orders of Charlemagne, King of the Franks.’ So, bluntly, reported the author of the Royal Frankish Annals, the main Frankish narrative for the period, which were written up in 790 or so. By the time those annals had been put into print at Cologne in 1521, Charlemagne had come to be ...”

“... where he ran amok, insulting generals and riding the equestrian statues. His second marriage, to Elizabeth Hardwick, was essentially an enduring one, and her devotion and intelligence illuminate and support this biography. Other women promised a new leaf, and eventually there was the romance of a departure for England: ‘a new alliance’, as he put ...”

“... treated as freakish androgynes, like Maesia who defended herself in the Forum. The obvious case is Elizabeth I’s belligerent address to the troops at Tilbury in 1588 in the face of the Spanish Armada.10 In the words many of us learned at school, she seems positively to avow her own androgyny: ‘I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the ...”

“... scribble across the simple mystery of Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. Vermeer is the reverse of a king; his art the very opposite of Lowell’s credo that ‘the artist’s existence becomes his art.’ Vermeer’s pictures are endlessly mysterious and commonplace precisely because the artist is not in them, has been able so completely to exclude himself. And ...”

“... could cite the odd tag from the Iliad and the Odyssey (Odysseus’s assertion ‘let there be one king’ was a favourite), but even literate people would have had only a general idea that the Odyssey was about a magical journey home and that the Iliad was about war. The few who actually read Homer at this time tended to read Latin translations, such as those ...”

“... call the company ‘fox’ for nothing.I liked Pollack. He had swag. He answered to the moniker ‘King P’ and looked the part of a Hollywood high-roller. (His big hit at the time was They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?; he went on to make Tootsie and Out of Africa, for which he won an Academy Award.) He pulled up for our first session at Mabery Road in a red ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was a Habsburg and a Catholic, and was nominally but not personally an arch-enemy of Elizabeth.) Kelley was also receiving regular letters from Lord Burghley, the Queen’s chief adviser, begging him to return home ‘to honour Her Majesty … with the fruits of such great knowledge as God hath given him’. Or if he could not personally ...”

“... died of typhoid at the age of 18. It even had its lost princess when, in the next year, his sister Elizabeth, afterwards known as the Queen of Hearts, married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and disappeared into a long and fairly inglorious future. Both events linger on in the shadowy background to Shakespeare’s very late play The Two Noble Kinsmen. This ...”

“... Austen, and posed New Age questions on the courtship rituals of Pride and Prejudice: ‘Suppose Elizabeth Bennet said to her parents: “I’ve found a life partner I really love, and she’s a woman”?’ Though I had asked for a modern hotel, with a telly and a minibar, my hosts were sure that I would enjoy The Morning Glory, a local guest house near the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... roof-climbing could dissipate the calumny. Again he finds a useful epigraph, this time in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.’ He is not one for self-analysis, but he says: ‘I was full of self-confidence when I first went to Eton ... Public school and three long years ...”

“... the Doctor (‘I hold the Plagues of Egypt in my hands’) makes a personal appearance in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, chosen for the launch of another of those fanatical Islamic prophets. Dr Fu Manchu, tall, cadaverous and skullcapped, is ‘evil immutable, apparently eternal’, able to assemble the powers of hell in an Egyptian oasis or ...”

“... through the prism of his private life have drawn from its pages. But with the publication of Elizabeth Kendall’s Balanchine and the Lost Muse, the first twenty years of Balanchine’s life have been revisited free of his mythical guidance (‘soft focus’ might be a better way to put it) and revised. A historian and dance critic fluent in ...”