“... Sunday afternoon​ was Beethoven time – torpor, majesty. Tired after cooking the lunch, but sweetly imploring, my father relished his captive audience. Mother and older brother had somehow slipped out of the sitting room, which left me and my sister, both musical, both too young to be free. My father stood by the coffin-like gramophone, a bulky inheritance from ailing Uncle Jimmy ...”

“... Before Anne Boleyn laid her head on the executioner’s block, she bent and wrapped the hem of her dress around her feet. She thereby ensured that, if in her death throes she were to spreadeagle her legs, the crowd would not see up her skirt ...”

“... Light continue the long, diffuse revenge plot that unifies the first two volumes of the trilogy. Her Thomas Cromwell is a loyal servant of Cardinal Wolsey. In Bring Up the Bodies he revenged himself on those who engineered his master’s fall by having them executed along with Anne Boleyn: ‘look at what Cromwell has wreaked, in two years, on Wolsey’s ...”

“... the 1920 Cheval Blanc ‘of the magnificence of the purple beech’; the 1870 Lafite ‘of the majesty of the Royal Oak’ . . . Mind you, the French have always been good at this sort of thing . . . A bit more down to earth were the late Louis Jadot’s last words on the subject: ‘There are four things to do when tasting a wine. First look at it and ...”

“... of vast learning and of a prose style that could bring water to the eyes of his adversaries. Her early chapters show how much Bentley owed to the classical editors who preceded him in Cambridge, Thomas Stanley and Thomas Gale. Otherwise, she tends to treat the English dimensions of Bentley’s career as a sideshow. ...”

“... fence bearing an advertisement for a quack cure. Another is kissing a young milkmaid, and feeling her up under her bodice; the milk slopping from her pail is eagerly scooped up in his hat by another soldier. Yet another filches a pie from the tray of a pie-seller; another has punctured a ...”

“... begun. But Boswell may have hoped for a more dramatic Amazon, one driven by passion to rescue her prince. This small, calm woman didn’t fit that fantasy. But, as he found over the next few days, ‘mighty soft’ was a false impression too. She was witty and tough. She teased Dr Johnson for not being ‘a young buck’, and she was ready – almost ...”

“... while Matilda, who really is miraculous in that she has magic powers, fails to be recognised by her parents. Her mother, unaware that she was pregnant until very near the point of delivery, neither wanted a baby nor knew what to do with one; her father was expecting a boy (he persists ...”

“... with a potentially fatal heart condition. His best friend, Alex, asks him to conceive a child with her. And of course he comes into an unusually large amount of money. He also tutors an eight-year-old boy from an undocumented Salvadorean immigrant family, goes out with a glamorous and maddeningly self-sufficient artist, and prepares for two separate ...”

“... him from entering the field. However, while acknowledging with apparent meekness ‘the majesty of the law’, especially with regard to biography, he seems not to have been overawed by it. The four writers organise their material in very different ways. We can now begin to see the symmetry of Sherry’s three-volume plan. The first instalment took ...”

“... silver. As Adam Smith wryly remarked, for the first time in human history, Fortune had granted her devotees ‘something not very unlike that profusion of precious metals’ they had spent centuries looking for. ‘One might call oneself emperor of this kingdom,’ Cortés boasted to his sovereign, ‘with no less glory than that of Germany’ – the Holy ...”

“... of that photograph, have yet to evolve.The slice of world that is vouchsafed to the queen and her many dependants, to whom she doles out annual performance-related pocket money, is skew, widdershins, fighting time – as they stride confidently into the past weighed down by gongs that are no more than decorative. They greet yesterday with sashes and ...”

“... significance.The amount of gold on the leaves is astonishing. Used to indicate divine honour and majesty, worship and purity, gold leaf was applied with microscopic attention by medieval illuminators, from delicate single initials to the heavy gold ground of the 13th-century psalter crafted by William de Brailes, who lived in Oxford. The glistening ...”

“... lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the tea-table. He shut her up by saying ‘I am not interested in my novels. I haven’t written one for more than thirty years.’ It is the living voice of that grumpy old man. H.G. Wells, whose ‘taste is not for delicate writing’, can occasionally irrupt with invincible common ...”

“... words of Israel Costa, a Jewish contemporary, ‘like a daughter to him … he did everything for her and fulfilled her every desire’. In 1864 ‘Aziza accompanied Shamama into exile, along with her husband, Moses, and their newborn son, Nissim. In Paris, they lived first with, then ...”