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“... like a fisherman, goading them to interrupt on the subjects he favoured. A small gang of raucous young Tories swallowed the bait: ‘T-S-R-2,’ they chanted in fatuous indignation at the cancellation of some obscure and well-forgotten fighter plane. The speaker cocked an ear and called for more. ‘Did I hear TSR2?’ he called sweetly. As the baying ...”

“... and blasted as a view of the Somme, an idyll, as it seemed to me then, irretrievably lost, and young though I was I knew this. But of course I was wrong. It wasn’t irretrievable and to look at the grounds today one would have no idea that such a violation had ever occurred. And it had occurred, too, with even greater devastation at other country houses ...”

“... taken orders, Smith had gone as a gentleman’s tutor to Edinburgh, where he was welcomed by the young Turks of the Whig élite, with whom, in 1802, he founded the Edinburgh Review. Great wits don’t always readily agree, and there was another on the scene in the person of Henry Cockburn, whose career and reputation show several points of similarity with ...”

“... successor in the royal favour, Buckingham. James’s practice of raising attractive and low-born young men to high office and influence gave a carrying wind to a persistent theme of the plays of the time: that of the upstart royal favourite who manipulates and betrays the king’s friendship. If the theatre drew on politics for its motifs, life turned to art ...”

“... looks were stunning – it is the only appropriate adjective’; W.B. Yeats: ‘the handsomest young man in England’; H.W. Nevinson: ‘the whole effect was almost ludicrously beautiful’). The principal driver of myth-creation was the sonnets, whose notion of willing sacrifice in a noble cause had unerringly caught the public mood in this early ...”

“... it were to be wished of all wise men and Her Majesty’s good subjects,’ he wrote to Robert Dudley, ‘that one of these two queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be a unity of the whole isle.’ Portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots by François Clouet ...”

“... had it that the Reeds were descended from the bastard son of an 18th or 19th-century Earl of Dudley. Henry senior’s other enthusiasms included reading, but the literary abilities of his son Henry seem, paradoxically, to have been inherited from a mother who was illiterate. Born Mary Ann Ball, the eldest child of a large family that had migrated from ...”

“... and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to reassure him that all the appropriate ...”

“... records in 1898, ‘Went for a short ride up Maddingley road. Walked into old chalk pit full of young trees,’ the flash of hindsight tells us that this is the origin of a key episode in The Longest Journey; but in the moment of its happening whatever thoughts or feelings it stirred in him remain hidden. In the more revealing notebook diaries Forster ...”

“... Protestant politicians, including Walsingham and the Queen’s favourite of favourites, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, pulled off a small victory on the domestic front. They took the Queen off to East Anglia on a progress, where they stage-managed a local political revolution which threw out of office the leading Catholics of the region and delivered ...”

“... a large equestrian statue of their son Edward, but the villagers did not favour the idea of a young horseman riding up the aisle of the church and, finally, the statue was squeezed into the family’s private chapel. It is a pity, perhaps, that so much attention is given to the already over-exposed families of the ‘Souls’ and the ...”

“... in the Virginia Company and, a year after that, sailing with a trade mission to Russia under Sir Dudley Digges. In another two years he was off, more adventurously still, to the Barbary Coast, on the coat-tails of an expedition sent out against the corsairs. The motive for each of these involvements, at any rate in the first instance, was clearly the quest ...”

“... feeling pessimistic about the outlook for the case. Even the fact that during her early years the young woman in question was becoming fluent in three languages besides her own, and reading assiduously and learning to write letters in an exquisite italic hand, scarcely counterbalances the accumulation of woes, or suggests that the sufferer might go on to ...”

“... of her early life and apprenticeship. Starkey confesses to having half fallen in love with the young Elizabeth, but to be merely interested in the later Gloriana, ‘her face caked in carmine and white lead ... an English Turandot’. But he had better sustain that interest, since this is only the first of two projected volumes on the subject, ‘the book ...”

“... just top-quality calfskin. It was ‘virgin parchment, such as never bore hair’: the skin of ‘young things found in the dam’s belly’ – Hilliard called it ‘abortive’ vellum. It was carefully stretched and smoothed, then pasted onto card. Many of his miniatures are backed with playing cards: sometimes the face of the card is left visible so a ...”