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“... in the Tower of London. The accompanying lavishly produced catalogue, edited by Anne Curry and Malcolm Mercer, contains 24 contributions from a distinguished cast of historians, including three from France. Rowena Archer, in a piece on war widows, notes the appalling casualty rate in some French noble families. The Craon family from Anjou, which had a ...”

“... rebel. They do, when their clubs face a severe enough threat. Revolts at Manchester United over Malcolm Glazer’s loading debt onto the club and at Wimbledon FC over the club’s owners moving the team 56 miles away to Milton Keynes resulted in the creation of new, breakaway clubs, FC United of Manchester and AFC Wimbledon. In 1990, in Edinburgh, Wallace ...”

“... the body until Judgment Day, became the last person to be burned for heresy. Wightman, a literate mercer from Staffordshire, was armed to the teeth with biblical quotations and never ducked a verbal scrap. His last debate, of course, was the one he lost. By this time, however, there was another way to win: emigration to the Low Countries or the New World. A ...”

“... in Norfolk since the late 14th century; his father, Sir Richard, was a cloth merchant (or mercer), who had thrived first on the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey and then of Thomas Cromwell, and had been knighted for his success in procuring foreign loans. Richard even had the nerve to ask Henry VIII to honour one of Wolsey’s unpaid debts. His son, born ...”

“... the wrong size.                                      (June Mercer Langfield) Such laughter is submarine but not profound, and anyway has very little to do with parody. But then it is often hard to tell whether Brett is an incompetent anthologist, or whether his parodists are incompetent, or both. Under Tennyson, there ...”

“... a beautiful man, smoked cigars, and was pursued from race to race by a gaggle of female fans. (Sir Malcolm Campbell of Bluebird fame called her – apparently without irony – ‘the greatest sportsman I know’.) Special ‘friends’ included the lesbian actresses Tallulah Bankhead and Gwen Farrar. Carstairs, the Evening News reported in 1925, could ...”