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“... the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a ...”

“... written by Hilary Mantel or Antonia Fraser. It was written more than 140 years ago by James Anthony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada put the Tudor show on the road. That wasn’t Froude’s only legacy. His Life of Carlyle, published in 1885, inaugurated modern biography, biography with no ...”

“... Fox sisters, after John Beavis’s own father, the surgeon, how could there be?’ Beavis’s son Anthony – Aldous, as we apprehend – is overwhelmed by the enveloping gloom: ‘He walked as though at the bottom of a moving well. Its black walls rustled all around him. He began to cry.’ Two years after his mother’s death, inflammation of the cornea ...”

“... raised to dignity and wealth by Mazel’s gift of good luck, manages to milk a lioness to cure the King; when bad luck has his turn, he spoils his good fortune by saying it is dog’s milk. His fortunes are ruined, for a while, anyway. Again the drawings – in this case brush-drawings by Margot Zemach, rather in the manner of Ben Shahn – are not strictly ...”

“... the reality was another matter. He knew that his real home had been the condemned playground. Anthony Powell comments on the odd fact that Connolly’s chosen and not uncherished home in later years was not some castle in Spain or a Dordogne farmhouse but a bald redbrick villa in an Eastbourne street, well away from the sea but not so far from his ...”

“... impression that he had never heard of any of these people before he met and quarrelled with Sir Anthony Part at the Department of Industry. The Civil Service mandarins seem to have driven him back to a glorious time when the King had his head chopped off and all his civil service supporters fled for their lives. Even more ...”

“... of American resolve is in prospect, the figure of Hitler is as difficult to exclude as the head of King Charles. The drawback in the analogy is that, from a Hitler, it is impossible to demand much less than his complete destruction or unconditional surrender. Still, other keywords such as ‘expansion’ and ‘poison gas’ do keep on creeping in. Partly as a ...”

“... material. You only had to look around and speculate – for example, on a film poster in which Nat King Cole is airbrushed from his seat and the blonde white singer left standing beside the piano without an accompanist. The idea was to entertain, raise spirits, to report on the talent pouring out of the townships, the energy, the razzmatazz, the musicians, the ...”

“... politics of 18th-century Protestant Dissent – the very spearhead of English radicalism – since Anthony Lincoln’s monograph in 1958. But if British historians are more irreligious than their American counterparts, they are at least less whiggish. Too many American historians look too simplistically at the English Civil War/Revolution for pointers towards ...”

“... is built on a familiar Redgrove system which might be called the Midas Variation. Everything that King Midas touched turned to gold. In the Midas Variation everything that Peter Redgrove touches turns to one thing, be it stone or clocks or bees or wasps or, in this case, pure horse manure: He is going to horse-worship at the Races. Everything about him ...”

“... presidential election. One of the few US commentators to have an understanding of Iraqi politics, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, writes that ‘Iraqis may be deeply divided along sectarian, ethnic, tribal and factional lines,’ but they nevertheless ‘have a national consciousness, a great deal of ...”

“... described a bibulous evening at Number Ten that autumn, when Churchill told his foreign secretary Anthony Eden how to deal with the troublesome Egyptians and other Arabs: ‘Rising from his chair, the old man advanced on Anthony with clenched fists, saying with the inimitable Churchill growl, “Tell them that if we have ...”

“... Why are we being compelled to think about how male pianists speak? King Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945) exerted no such pressure. Nor did Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948). Yet, while Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) presented a woman incapable of speech, François Girard’s Thirty-Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994) presented a man who was abnormally articulate – one who in the 22nd film, for example, rehearses the revealing personal ad: ‘Friendly, companionably reclusive, socially unacceptable, alcoholically abstemious, tirelessly talkative, zealously unzealous, spiritually intense, minimally turquoise, maximally ecstatic loon seeks moth or moths with similar equalities for purposes of telephonic seduction, Tristan-esque trip-taking ...”

“... babies was to go away and put up in a hotel where he could write in peace. Many novelists, like Anthony Powell, found that they could not get down to work while hostilities were in progress. Not so Waugh, for whom hostilities were natural. In the beginning of the war he made time to write Put out more flags, one of his funniest books. By the end he had ...”

“... to Hollywood. Back in England she fell ‘instantly’ in love with the 33-year-old film producer Anthony Havelock-Allan, marrying him three years later. They had two sons; the older one had Down’s syndrome and the other is a judge. She never criticised Havelock-Allan, but David, evidently rightly, thinks he was ‘a selfish husband and a ...”