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“... grows from the records outwards, from the small piece of grit in the Plea Roll to the published pearl. In this respect, Professor Elton is entitled to his identification with his subject. So he is also in stressing their common respect for legal records, without falling into what Elton once called the ‘essentially a-historical’ attitude of lawyers ...”

“... II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the court, ‘wanton poets’, Italian masques by night, and ‘pleasing shows’. Edward, walking abroad, is to encounter pages dressed as ‘sylvan nymphs’, and Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s ...”

“... yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it over the years to get American novelists to jump through hoops. And when she asked Mailer if he’d care to contribute something ...”

“... to meet – leaders of governments-in-exile, naval commanders, bomber pilots, H.G. Wells, the boy-king of Yugoslavia – was made available. Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy ...”

“... But there is no way that Elizabeth swisser-swattered with Sir Walter. She may have liked his pearl earrings and the turned-up beard, and few ageing queens would object to receiving poems comparing them to ‘the valley of Perue/ whose summer ever lasteth’, but she was relatively pragmatic in her affections. Ralegh knew, and she knew, that her principal ...”

“... literature, fashion and food. By 1911, Henry Clay Frick had acquired Velázquez’s portrait of King Philip IV of Spain for $475,000, the highest price he had ever paid for a painting. William Randolph Hearst shipped over cartloads of hispano-moresque plates, furniture, choir screens, even entire cloisters for his new castle in California. As one Spanish ...”

“... thriving as a student, and didn’t discover poetry until he entered college the year before Pearl Harbor. Though he took basic training at twenty, Hecht’s division was not deployed until the final months of the war, when it liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany. As he knew some French and German, Hecht was asked to interview the ...”

“... to a private club two years after the ball. The building was torn down just before the attack on Pearl Harbour. There was continuity in Meiji, of course. Both the infatuation with and the fear of the Western world existed before 1868. But even the curiosity for strange customs and dress, displayed in Meiji woodcuts, and the minute descriptions of foreign ...”

“... forth of a prince’, so a single ‘s’ was squeezed in at the end); Elizabeth’s mother-of-pearl locket ring (usually at Chequers); her girlhood translations of English prayers into Latin, Italian and French. While Mary Tudor, her Catholic half-sister, was queen, Elizabeth observed Mass, kept her head down and bided her time. On loan from the National ...”

“... airplanes or yids. Landsman can smell fish offal from the canneries, grease from the fry pits at Pearl of Manila, the spew of taxis, an intoxicating bouquet of fresh hat from Grinspoon’s Felting two blocks away. But there are other moments of more universal precision. Berko Shemets, Landsman’s partner, ‘salts an egg and bites it. His teeth leave ...”

“... But even more surprisingly, the riot erupted in Dongguan, a humming industrial city in the Pearl River Delta, the manufacturing hub of southern China. The delta, which has cultural and commercial ties with Hong Kong, is the world’s workshop. Nearly every major Western company dependent on overseas manufacturing sources products in the low-slung ...”

“... Americans agreed and were grateful for what they could learn from their British colleagues. Until Pearl Harbor brought the US into the war, Churchill had aggressively courted American support, but the president learned that the prime minister was blowing hot and cold about scientific collaboration. If the US was going to be, as Roosevelt promised in December ...”

“... Saud (generally known as Ibn Saud), succession has passed down the line of his sons. The present king, Salman, reportedly Ibn Saud’s 25th son, inherited the throne in 2015 on the death of his half-brother Abdullah and is close to being the last of his generation. At 81 Salman is in fragile health: he has had two strokes and suffers from Alzheimer’s. On ...”

“... of Blériot the Count de Lambert flew over Paris and circled the Eiffel Tower at 300 metres. If King Kong had climbed the Tower Parisians could not have been more excited. It is true that Santos-Dumont had done the same thing in a dirigible in 1901, but the Count’s feat was the equivalent of a man performing bicycle stunts in the air. That year an air ...”

“... from Paris, rumoured to be ‘a druggie’; and Conchita Maxwell, daughter of Ernie ‘the Oil King’ Maxwell and his much younger Mexican cleaning lady. Finally, there are Lee’s roommates: Dede, ‘literally, a follower’, whose obvious Jewishness disqualifies her from consideration as a Serious Babe, and Sin-Jun, a deceptively mild Korean who hides a ...”