“... Jane’s personality unravelled with Catherine Howard’s fortunes, and one historian, Lacey Baldwin Smith, thinks perhaps she was mad in a covert way all along; this theory has not found many takers. Still, for a short time, she acted suicidally. She was a woman in her mid-thirties, a courtier bred in the bone. She was familiar with the vicious ...”

“... Death in Venice to Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar to the work of Genet and Isherwood and Baldwin and Burroughs, but as each new novel or play or poem appeared it was treated as a one-off; if the work was a critical success it was despite its homosexual content, if the work failed it was because of it. But by the Seventies gay men in the United States ...”

“... works in 24 volumes were translated into English by Lytton Strachey’s brother and sister-in-law, James and Alix Strachey, and published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. But the Fabians were not attracted to Freud. He was an author, Shaw announced, ‘utterly without delicacy’. And Beatrice Webb believed that this way madness lay. What ...”

“... as Labour’s relatively new shadow home secretary, he gave a speech in response to the murder of James Bulger that brought him to national prominence, and served as a kind of template for his response to 9/11. The Bulger murder, Blair believed, in its depravity and its horror, served to make the connection between other, lesser crimes that might otherwise go ...”

“... projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”

“... meals proceeded from kitchen to dining room by miniature railway, they owned a London house in St James’s Square, a Highland estate on the island of Jura, and a 16-bedroom seaside ‘cottage’ at Sandwich in Kent. Waldorf and Nancy Astor and their five children somehow found the time to live in all four; worried about the safety of Jura milk, Nancy had her ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”

“... out of its 395 articles were taken word for word from the Government of India Act passed by the Baldwin cabinet in 1935. But the most important segment of the umbilical cord attaching the Congress regime of the post-independence years to the arrangements of the Raj was the least conspicuous. A mere six articles out of nearly four hundred dealt with ...”