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“... in Italy the following winter’. Their ‘union of souls’, as Jangfeldt (or his translator, Harry Watson) quaintly puts it, ‘took place in Venice in May 1893’. The relationship lasted until Victoria’s death in 1930, though it was severely strained during the First World War. Victoria, the daughter of Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden and a cousin of ...”

“... fictional engineering was never designed to work on mocking readers in the first place, but on the Harry Potter-primed ‘young adult’ market, full of girls longing for sex and scared rigid by the very thought. To whom, it seems, Edward is like a dream – he’s so clean and fragrant, for one thing. Meyer’s vampires neither eat nor sleep nor breathe, nor ...”

“... stockbrokers lacked the resources or incentive to undertake serious research into them. In 1896, Harry Lawson launched his unsound motor-car stock not with anything so mundane as a realistic prospectus, but with the dual attractions of the cricketer Prince Ranjitsinhji’s name and a London-to-Brighton car race. The ...”

“... and for those with high profiles, and the loudest cheers at the post-conference rally were for Prince Mawayizeni Zulu’s election to the NEC (the result of an arcane dynastic dispute with King Goodwill and Chief Buthelezi) – and for the presence of an Iraqi representative. What is one to make of an organisation which cheers both for a Zulu ...”

“... invasions, Mercian Berkshire to the north had been next on the Wessex merger list, with a Wessex prince born in the county as a conciliatory factor – just as, three centuries later, Edward I invested his Carnarvon-born son with the title of Prince of Wales to help enlist the Welsh on his side after his takeover of the ...”

“... to gather writers at her court. In 1772 Christoph Martin Wieland was hired as tutor to the crown prince, the classic occupation of the late 18th-century man of letters. Goethe arrived three years later, fresh from the Europe-wide success of The Sorrows of Young Werther. He recommended another polymath, Johann Gottfried Herder, who arrived in 1776 and became ...”

“... by a dynastic alliance which was broken in 1837. The loss was the responsibility of bluff King Harry, who did not have the realism forced on his successors to confine his French crown to his coat of arms. His subjects might have been spared much misery if he had contented himself with what he had. A clear narrative emerges from Sharpe’s account. Henry ...”

“... with its penumbra of monastery buildings, complete enough to lend themselves for a scene or two in Harry Potter movies. Durham houses the tomb of early medieval Europe’s greatest historian, Bede, and that of another Anglo-Saxon monk, Cuthbert, probably a more effective bishop of Durham in death than in life. Cuthbert was also the name of the 16th-century ...”

“... Book Award for Between the World and Me, his essay on race and violence. Coates’s close friend Prince Jones was killed in Virginia in 2000. ‘When Prince Jones died, there were no cameras. There was nobody looking. The officer that killed him was not prosecuted. He was not even disciplined by the police force.’ In the ...”

“... a lecturer on the black church circuit in the Twenties, who claimed to be an Ethiopian prince captured by dervishes and educated in England. Figures like these are not mentioned in the standard academic surveys and Howe’s book is original in giving them scholarly space. He has little difficulty in disentangling the multiple ironies and ...”

“... country’s powerless parliament, but also restaurants, a bowling alley, various cultural venues (Harry Belafonte and Santana both performed there) and a gallery of artworks under the heading: ‘Are communists allowed to dream?’In their campaign to have the communist building demolished and the original palace reconstructed, conservatives not only had to ...”

“... penury and disgrace. The overweening monarch of the midland and north-eastern networks, friend of Prince Albert and snapper-up of country houses, he devised the ruse later known as the Ponzi scheme – inflating the price of shares by boosting dividends with capital. The aggregate losses of the inevitable crash amounted to some £80 million. By 1854 only half ...”

“... happily alone at the huge dining room table, ringing for every course. The much repeated story of Prince Aly Khan lighting her first cigarette found its punchline in ‘Angel’s Laundromat’: ‘He didn’t have a match actually.’ Here you see the first flourishing of the fact that she was one of the people who drew grace from others, who brought out ...”

“... purpose in mind, came face to face with a boy called Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. Charles Hamilton has left a record of how he went about the business of assembling his characters, picking up a podgy frame here, a pair of loud trousers there.) The author of But for Bunter, indeed, has ...”

“... introduced to Anglophone readers, in translations by the Viennese refugee and Brandeis professor Harry Zohn:* Many share my views with me. But I don’t share them with them. To have talent, to be a talent: the two are always confused. Why should one artist grasp another? Does Mount Vesuvius appreciate Mount Etna? At most, a feminine relationship of ...”