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“... Did you write it yourself?’ That is the first question any visiting journo asks Howard Marks about his autobiography, Mr Nice. Marks suppresses a yawn. The morning is not really his time. He’s in the middle of a promotional binge, late nights, dry-throat blather; the anecdotes on autopilot. By temperament he’s the contrary of the Tory apparatchik in the radio car ...”

“... Skippy Dies, which takes place at the private Seabrook College, the beleaguered history teacher, Howard, reads Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and becomes obsessed not just with the First World War but with the mythology of the White Goddess.Murray’s work isn’t quite like that of any other writer – certainly no modern Irish writer – but he has ...”

“... VIII, 2nd s of Henry VII, qv, S 1509: m 1st, Catherine of Aragon; 2nd, Anne Boleyn; 3rd, Jane Seymour; 4th, Anne of Cleves; 5th, Catherine Howard; 6th, Catherine Parr etc). The authors have made their own compromise, which, as the price of retaining connected prose, offers a highly selective summary of salient ...”

“... and Queen’s Old Hall; in London, he worked on the mansions of the Gilbert Scott, Flower and Howard families. He bought 186 Gwydir Street in 1886 with money he’d saved in his post office account and, with his wife, Mary Jane, and their three children, lived there until he died, in 1927. Transforming the interior of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Names matter to women partly because theirs change in adulthood more often than men’s. Among Jane Austen’s earliest writings are two spoof entries in a parish marriage register, where she published fictitious banns between Jane Austen of Steventon and Henry Frederic ...”

“... to staunch Mary’s haemorrhage by plunging her up to the waist in ice: his flirtation with Jane Williams (with whom Mary herself was later to fall in love); his nightmares of strangling Mary and of the sea overwhelming the house; various hallucinations including the one about meeting his own double, who asked him disconcertingly, ‘How long do you ...”

“... starlets to know that a really beautiful woman was rare indeed, in fact a ‘freak’. The actor Howard Duff described her as the ‘most beautiful thing he had ever seen’. To others, she was ‘an extraordinary creature’, ‘the Taj Mahal of beauty’. Or she ‘was like an animal, Ava. The sex thing.’ When ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Which is why history needs to engage emotions as well as the mind. Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges and Jane Simpson, the editors of The Land Is a Map, represent a new generation of young scholars skilled in indigenous languages. Their work is a sort of archaeological toponymy: placenames are like artefacts in surface archaeology. In their introduction, they offer ...”

“... yoked successively to four demanding Scandinavians. Bunche was a brilliant young professor at Howard University, making his name as an Africanist, when Gunnar Myrdal hired him to work on his Carnegie-funded study of race in America. Myrdal soon learned that his new collaborator would work hours no one else would and proceeded to extract from him some ...”

“... her rule. This motherless child, who, by 1544, had already seen so many ‘mothers’ come and go (Jane Seymour in childbirth seven years earlier, Catherine Howard beheaded five years after that), and who would see – and bring about – more women’s deaths in her time, had also been made fatherless, when by Act of ...”

“... shameless faker’ – a view later revised – and his ‘dungaree-wearing Lizzie wife’, Jane, whose own arrangement was the mirror-image of Burroughs’s with Joan. There is also Auden’s secretary Alan Ansen, who gets no credit here for working on the Naked Lunch manuscript with Ginsberg. Auden himself is briskly invoked (‘Auden say I am a ...”

“... pictures have the gift of total visual recall. Matisse is said to have had it. So is Berenson. Howard Hodgkin has it. My own visual memory is uncertain and self-deluding, except when it comes to Kitaj. His pictures come to my mind’s eye exactly, or so I believe, and they come with all the power of suppressed material, but on command. I wish I knew what ...”