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“... Of​ the many remedies Cole Porter used to kill pain – boys, drink, luxury – the most powerful was song. In October 1937, at the age of 46, out for an early morning canter at the Piping Rock Club in Locust Valley, New York, Porter lost his stirrups when his horse spooked at a bush and fell on him, crushing both his legs ...”

“... They were both children of the dynasty’s founder, Henry VII: Margaret, the subject of Linda Porter’s biography, born in 1489, and her sister Mary, seven years younger. Two later Tudor daughters escaped such a fate by becoming mistresses of their own fortunes through genealogical accident. Henry VIII’s dogged quest for a male heir through ...”

“... a corporate power that crosses national and class borders. Robert Altman’s new film, Prêt-à-Porter, is like La Dolce Vita grafted onto Funny Face. The unaffected and trusting Hepburn and Astaire would be marginalised or crushed in the fashion world portrayed here. Altman has never enjoyed a sustained period of artistic success or critical favour, and ...”

“... These books demonstrate once again that omniverous reading, massive industry, and what Roy Porter aptly calls a lethal power of concentration, are the cardinal virtues of the historian. Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire swelled to six volumes, a million and a half words, and eight thousand footnotes; his testicle also ...”

“... imaginations of Britons at home. Neither Stephen Daniels’s collection of essays nor those in Roy Porter’s Myths of the English explore the imperial-domestic connection directly. Yet both books illuminate its importance.To begin with, and as several of Daniels’s fine, perceptive essays suggest, knowing that they were an imperial people made Britons at ...”

“... the offspring of Nordic detectives and their professional acquaintances. Wallander’s daughter, Linda, once tried to commit suicide and used to worry him by disappearing for long stretches of time before becoming a police investigator herself in Mankell’s more recent novels. Eva Lind, the hero’s daughter in Arnaldur Indridason’s Voices, is an on-off ...”

“... for Jones’s corpse to be preserved in alcohol and placed in a lead coffin. When General Horace Porter, the US ambassador to France, went looking for it a century later, the only evidence of Jones’s interment was from an article published in Correspondance littéraire in 1859. Despite the refusal of Congress to finance the project, by 1905 the site of the ...”

“... sufficient to give reality to the fears of Whig ministers and their Hanoverian masters. Readers of Linda Colley’s In Defiance of Oligarchy, which gives a persuasive and sympathetic account of the Tory Party in these years, may wonder why Clark persists in saddling the Tories with so strong a tendency to Jacobitism long after 1715. The old view that it suited ...”

“... makes it to Milan, a little boy runs out and fetches him a bottle of grappa. ‘I sent for the porter and when he came I told him in Italian to get me a bottle of Cinzano at the wine shop, a fiasco of chianti and the evening papers.’ Once he’s up and ready to start courting Catherine Barkley in the style she deserves, they’re off to their favourite ...”

“... the period have been travelling in this direction for some time: it is a predictable corrective to Linda Colley’s argument for Georgian Britain’s cohesion and dynamism. What sets Semmel’s book apart, however, is the extraordinary richness of his analysis, and the wealth of material he has uncovered. Take the ‘emperor of Garrat’. In the 18th ...”

“... featured Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell; other guests included Merle Haggard, Mama Cass, Odetta, Linda Ronstadt, Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Burl Ives and Kris Kristofferson. The show first aired in September 1969; in February of that year Cash was busy recording with Dylan (they duet, kind of, on ‘Girl from the North Country’, the first track on ...”