“... grew up books-obsessed: as a 13-year-old she travelled to see Tolstoy to beg him not to kill off Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, then being serialised; she lost her nerve when she met him and just gave him a photo to sign. She got married when she was 18, to a judge, and moved to his estate in the provinces, but after ten years and three children she ...”

“... Something had happened recently to confirm this in Bill’s mind. At school two years previously, Peter Kearney – a short, pinched boy with hair on his upper lip and eyebrows like soot smudges – had begun to taunt him, at first only about small things, but subsequently about things more serious, like the quality of his handwriting and the answers he gave ...”

“... Peter Ackroyd’s new novel has been caught in the Gadarene rush of fiction brought out in time for the Booker Prize deadline. It won’t be lost in this year’s profusion of titles, and it won’t be harmed by the published assurance of a colleague of his on the Times that it is ‘a sure contender’ for the prize ...”

“... cell? Would it be any more or any less improper to pay someone for handing over a photograph of Prince William wearing a bikini? The court cases were scarcely covered by the Fleet Street newspapers, save to complain that they were taking place at all (the Daily Mail described Elveden as ‘a disgraceful attempt by police and prosecutors to intimidate ...”

“... human flesh and blood’. The Emperor promptly executes the physicians, but treats the frog like a prince, placing it in a precious bowl and feeding it royal delicacies. Later generations ceased to see Nero in quite such grotesque terms, but he easily maintained his position in the top ten of evil rulers, while earlier rivals, like Nimrod and Domitian, or ...”

“... not alter the law.’ Where in other states the civil law was conceived of as the will of the prince, the common law demarcated the monarch’s prerogatives, reserving to her and her ministers such acts as declaring war, making treaties or appointing judges and ministers, but prohibiting her from creating new monopolies or tribunals, and from levying ...”

“... school I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... the Commonwealth of Ants is more important to England’s wellbeing than the ambitious wars of the Prince of Butterflies’ (Wolsey). ‘In the early 17th century,’ Ms O’Connell concludes, ‘bourgeois pride was expressed in terms of the values of the élite ... by the end of the 17th century, it was expressed in terms of the values of the middle ...”

“... replacing the long-established guilds with institutions that would enjoy the patronage of a prince, and provide access to experts on anatomy and the complexities of linear perspective. Members would be able to reward younger talent and also – perhaps more important – exclude colleagues whom they considered unworthy (for instance painters of ornament ...”

“... and wax, so the tree will never get to emerge at all. Why a tree? Everyone says it’s because of Prince Albert, or at least Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III (so definitely a German tradition), but making a fuss of a conifer goes back further than that. A report from 1444 tells of a tree that was brought to Cornhill in the City of London ...”

“... why Lord and Lady Wilde paid those school fees. Merlin Holland’s essay on his grandfather in Peter Raby’s Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde illuminates these appropriations by charting a series of significant errors through multiple versions of Wilde’s history. Holland takes us back to one of the most familiar scenes from the life of Wilde: the bad ...”

“... Kuwait on the spur of the moment, possibly as a result of a personal insult spat out by the Crown Prince of Kuwait at a rancorous negotiating session with the Iraqis, possibly because he was convinced that the Americans were going to intervene anyway, so thought he might as well go for broke. If the latter is correct (there is some evidence to support ...”

“... and made him welcome. We all do that, all the colony over.’ It is in pursuit of such myths that Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda set out for the promised land; they learn the realities of life in the colony the hard way. Carey set himself against Dickens more explicitly nine years later, in Jack Maggs (1997), an imaginative reworking of Great ...”

“... Odysseus’ behaviour the night before he slaughters his wife Penelope’s suitors, which Peter Green translates like this: As a man cooking a paunch chockful of fat and blood on a fierce blazing fire will turn it to and fro, determined to get it cooked through as fast as he can, so Odysseus tossed this way and that, trying to work out how he was ...”

“... contributions from Jane Ohlmeyer on Ireland and Scotland as ‘laboratories of Empire’, and from Peter Mancall on the troubled relationship between Europeans and Native Americans in the 16th and 17th centuries. The second volume, concerned principally with slavery and the American Revolution, has a sparkling chapter on Native Americans by Daniel Richter, and ...”