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“... opened last year in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and went on to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, gave us a sample of the masterpieces in Soult’s collection and in the Galerie Espagnole in the Louvre, which was formed by Louis-Philippe partly out of that collection. In the Metropolitan Museum The Immaculate Conception was mounted on a special screen ...”

“... George V’s widow was still alive, one son was king as George VI, and another was ex-king as Duke of Windsor. Not surprisingly, their books were masterpieces of tact and discretion – qualities necessary in a courtier, but inhibiting in a biographer. Although he was given full access to the relevant papers, Nicolson was explicitly instructed to omit ...”

“... When Charles II died in 1685 without legitimate offspring, the throne passed to his brother James, Duke of York, who had been brought up in exile in France as a Catholic and who now began publicly attending mass. Within a few months the Duke of Monmouth’s abortive rebellion and Baron ...”

“... work miracles, surpass belief, beggar all description and beat everything). Then again, in the New York Review of Books I sometimes discover this same dash and élan, this zest and vim, this fire and mettle, this fizz and verve, this pep and go, this vehemence and violence, this thrust and push and kick and punch. What livewire or quicksilver – dynamo or ...”

“... than in written notes. George was now next in line to the throne after his father, but the young duke and duchess of York soon found that royal powerlessness began at home. It took them years to rescue their eldest sons from the clutches of a sadistic nanny who cut short the boys’ meetings with their parents by ...”

“... on her, and she could be a man – one of her own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and ...”

“... coming together of mass and élite culture, of black and white, and of men and women, in the New York of the Twenties. The two books are similar in method. Although she always has a thesis to defend or support, Douglas proceeds by producing a veritable blizzard of fact and anecdote, so that the reading of Terrible Honesty calls for patience, and for a ...”

“... and move on. The Queensberry family had a ‘cannibalistic idiot’ who should have been the third duke, but who was passed over in favour of his more amiable younger brother. However, what is possible among dukes may not be possible among royals. The nation was distressed at Princess May’s loss and so was her scheming mother, Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck ...”

“... likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its progeny’s progeny which must soon follow, securing the dynasty in perpetuity. But as London thrilled to the rich displays of chivalry, roses, pomegranates, castles, senators and dragons, the king was watching the nobles ...”

“... Governor gave him a captured French brigantine by way of compensation and in this he sailed to New York, a haunt of pirates, arriving shortly after the Blessed William’s crew had set off for the Indian Ocean, like so many of their kind. He found the colony in a state of political confusion caused by the Glorious Revolution; he backed the winning ...”

“... opposition to the government alleged that the Royal Navy was riddled with popery and that the Duke of York (Lord High Admiral and the future James II) had wasted public funds. A select committee was appointed to investigate. When his enemies won the general election in March, the ...”

“... grant and the occupant of Claremont. The Prince Regent’s childless brother Frederick York became heir; and after him the grotesque sequence of unmarried brothers, starting with William Clarence, replete with bastards, gout and debts. Now began the richly comic lurching into matrimony of these unwieldy Sons of England, competing to be the founder ...”

“... were not actually born to succeed. King George V was 27 before the death of his elder brother, the Duke of Clarence, put him directly in line to the throne. King George VI was 41 when Edward VIII unexpectedly abdicated. And Queen Elizabeth II spent her first decade with no inkling that she might one day be called upon to reign. Taken together, these examples ...”

“... 1500, Pole was a Plantagenet, with a claim to the English throne. Both his grandfather, George, Duke of Clarence, and his uncle, Edward, Earl of Warwick, had been attainted and executed for treason; the latter, the Plantagenet heir, had been shut up soon after the Tudor victory at Bosworth and imprisoned by Henry VII for most of his short life. Henry VIII ...”

“... of Derry, whose mistresses and profane talk made the English colony shun him; Henry Cardinal, Duke of York, brother to Charles Edward, at 78 ‘still uncommonly handsome, with the freshness of youth in his cheeks’; and finally the Pope, whose toe Margaret and Katherine were all agog to kiss, when he ‘by a motion of ...”