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“... when he began this book could, he says, ‘be written out on a luggage tag’. But (like Cary Grant, perhaps, in North by Northwest) he found himself irresistibly drawn in. His thoroughness and energy are phenomenal. He visits every place important to his grandfathers in Ireland, Turkey and the Middle East, tracks down every relevant surviving functionary ...”

“... That levying money for or to the use of the Crowne by [pretence] of prerogative without grant of Parlyament … is illegal. Although it took a while to settle in (monarchs continued purporting to suspend legislation into the early 18th century), the essential purpose and effect of the Bill of Rights were to make the crown, which had long since been ...”

“... home.) There’s the one about Liszt the lady-killer. In reality, Liszt was more of a Cary Grant than a Clark Gable, more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take ...”

“... new station means the area is being ‘regenerated’, which makes the authorities more likely to grant planning permission and businesses more likely to move in and commission Canary Wharf Contractors to build for them. Since CWG started on the new station they’ve been contracted to build a public plaza on the estate as well as the new HQ of the European ...”

“... coronation, the Guardian flourished its discovery of a document recording Edward Colston’s grant to William III of shares in the Royal African Company, which shipped more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have ...”

“... and kicking.In My Phantoms, Riley’s latest novel, the mother character takes centre stage. Helen Grant has the disposition of a wounded animal, twice-divorced and in permanent need of distraction. Manipulative and wildly self-absorbed, she is capable of inflicting Livia Soprano levels of damage on her offspring. Helen hasn’t exactly got the life she wanted ...”

“... Ealing Vicarage rape judgment was critical to the climate which allowed the law to change and to grant victims the right of appeal against sentences which don’t fit the crime. Other respectable readers of Rape will include some of those few committed Christians which our secular society is capable of producing. They will want to take heart from Jill ...”

“... Halldór respected all his life,’ Guðmundsson writes, ‘it was Hemingway.’ In an early grant application (Laxness was not quite 23), he claimed to have written six long novels by the age of twenty and destroyed five of them. He wrote poems when young and plays when old, essays and memoirs of various stripes all along. By ...”

“... partly on evidence from North Southwark where he worked in a community planning centre until its grant was cut by a council no longer prepared to go on funding a thorn in its side. Nothing is resented more bitterly amongst the traditionalist old guard of Bermondsey than the fact that the new oppositionists were ‘outsiders’ and even in some cases actually ...”

“... Local government is to be made more independent of the block grants of Whitehall. (Paradoxically, Michael Heseltine is already achieving this result in spite of himself by his punitive use of the grant system, which is forcing some councils to raise almost all their own revenue.) The ‘embarrassingly radical ...”

“... of Heinrich von Kleist and Henriette Vogel, who died together on 21 November 1811. ‘May heaven grant you a death even half as joyous and inexpressibly cheerful as mine,’ Kleist wrote to his sister. He was ‘blissfully happy’, he told his cousin, and looking forward to this ‘most splendid and pleasurable of deaths’. Vogel called it ‘their great ...”

“... inaccurate. Credit tends to gravitate to the senior scientists because it is they who sit on the grant and prize committees and they tend to assume the lab chief deserves credit for what comes out of his laboratory. The Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin went to John Macleod and Frederick Banting, whereas it was Banting and Charles Best who did the ...”

“... the grounds that vaccines could cause infertility in women. One of the petition’s co-authors was Michael Yeadon, a former vice president of Pfizer, where he spent sixteen years as an allergy and respiratory researcher.Perhaps the real problem is hubris. There have been so many things we thought we knew but didn’t. How many people reassured us Covid-19 ...”

“... for 300,000 and now housing a million. I have come back a year later to launch my book here, on a grant from Somerville College, Oxford, which kindly and puzzlingly funds long-gone graduates for such things as a book launch in a country with no bookstores and half the population illiterate. The launch is at Monrovia’s City Hall, one of the few buildings not ...”

“... death. She was 18. Angelica had thought that Clive Bell was her father; in fact it was Duncan Grant, who lived with her mother, but generally slept with men and wasn’t keen on acting as an authority figure. Angelica retreated into an affair with the much older Garnett, who – and this is where it begins to sound like you’re making things up – had ...”