“... to prosperity and prestige. It appears to have been the first of his plays to be acted before Queen Elizabeth, and it was later revived for James after Shakespeare’s company had been adopted as the King’s Men. It has usually been read as an ostentatiously effortless display of how a degree-less provincial could ...”

“... fast that it was daily harder to measure the fall. Charles Windsor (future sovereign etc) and his mother were chiefly preoccupied with making life more tolerable for him by navigating Camilla Parker-Bowles back into public acceptability. Without offending the wish of two divorcees for a decent life together, one can surely point out that, set against the ...”

“... Blue Bird. The work starred Jane Fonda as Night, Ava Gardner as Luxury, and Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of Light and Maternal Love. You can see where the problems might arise, even if Maeterlinck was not a bit of a problem to start with. It was a Soviet-American coproduction, partly shot in what was then Leningrad, where ...”

“... his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed mother, brave and tearful and intermittent, threatens the decorum of it all. Behind the contrasting frames of mind and styles of architecture, there loom the twined ancient families: the Tothills, who had been flamboyant and had even perhaps figured in the heated ...”

“... apologise, brag, defend, accuse, entertain, mislead, console etc). The selections include Queen Charlotte Sophia chastising her son William for being ‘a true trifling character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of ...”

“... to a dysfunctional middle-class couple. Her emotionally absent father, a doctor, treated her mother like a fool. Her deeply conventional mother tried to co-opt her sympathy, while repeatedly criticising her looks (about which Renault would always be sensitive), complaining that she was insufficiently ladylike and ...”

“... I’m so glad to hear that your son is having some success at last, Mrs Sinclair,’ said the QueenMother. ‘We all follow his career with the greatest interest.’ Downriver XII, ‘The Sexing of Stones’ The other week, I went up to the Compendium bookshop in Camden Town, London NW1, to hear Iain Sinclair read from his latest novel ...”

“... as Jane Carlyle recalled, ‘at the last the idea struck him “like a pistol shot” “it is my Mother!”’ Rosina proceeded to give the crowd a full – not to say, lurid – account of her husband’s failings. Later that month, when Bulwer-Lytton invited her to visit him, supposedly to discuss a financial settlement, the horrified Jane Carlyle ...”

“... preferred secular books, especially Greek and Roman histories in translation. A biography of Mary, Queen of Scots caught her eye in 1639. She regularly bought almanacs for the farm, and once ‘a litle boke of asstrolagye called Arcandam’. She even fell for sensational pamphlets now and then, including one about the ...”

“... to the True Faith, offering himself as a suitable husband first for Elizabeth and then for Mary Queen of Scots. The Habsburgs liked to put a benign gloss on these insatiable matrimonial ambitions, bridling prettily at the wisecrack of the Hungarian king, Matthias Corvinus: ‘bella gerant alii, tu, Felix ...”

“... faction, led by George Abbott as archbishop of Canterbury, and including James’s wife, Queen Anne, saw an opportunity to push their own anti-Spanish agenda by toppling Carr and elevating Buckingham. After a year of cupbearing, Buckingham was made gentleman of the bedchamber, knighted and given an annual allowance ...”

“... rare edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays. They set out for home on the Titanic, but only Harry’s mother arrived; her husband and son were never seen again. In her son’s memory, Eleanor Widener built the greatest university library in the world. Harry’s collection was preserved intact and housed in the heart of the building, its treasures on permanent ...”

“... was ‘set down’ and delivered to Lord Keeper Puckering. His claim that it was read by the Queen is confirmed by the scribal copy of the Note, which is endorsed in Puckering’s hand: ‘Copye of Marloes blasphemyes, as sent to Her H’. In the first edition of The Reckoning I pursued Thomas Drury some way. A fact ...”

“... like Harrods, already at its current site in Knightsbridge, did not have a cosmetics department. Queen Victoria was four years dead, but her abhorrence of face painting lived on. Rubinstein, born in Poland in 1872, and Elizabeth Arden, born in Toronto in 1881, quickly removed the aura of the hospital from face cream and ...”

“... security adviser, John Bolton, ‘and he loves it’.The president exults: ‘The meeting with the queen was incredible. I think I can say I really got to know her because I sat with her many times and we had automatic chemistry. You understand that feeling. It’s a good feeling. But she’s a spectacular woman … There ...”