“... 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 ...”

“... her 16th year, she was lovely & amiable and chancing to fall in love with an elegant Bonnet, her mother had just compleated bespoke by the Countess of — she placed it on her gentle Head and walked from her Mother’s shop to make her Fortune’: so ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’, a hard romance written by the very young ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Morrison ... was Secretary of State to the Lord Monjoy, our chief Governour, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,’ says Sheridan, so he ‘had the best oportunity, of knowing the State of this Nation at that time’. An Irish rebellion led by ringleaders of English extraction, a pattern which seems to have remained ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... waiting to see my box emerge and it wasn’t there. Like Daddy, it was gone.Shortly afterwards, my mother agreed to house-sit somewhere near Hampton Court. I think she was fleeing the damp in the coach house, which came from all directions: down through the roof, causing the insulation tiles on the ceiling to detach themselves (one landed on the holy grail, my ...”

“... alleges, ‘always said’ that her husband was homosexual. I am amply familiar with what my mother ‘always said’, and told the biographer what this was. Lilli was as quick to see in Rex a ‘latent’ homosexuality as, reasonably enough, others have been, and Wapshott himself proceeds to just such an assessment, in terms with which my ...”

“... see me being at all “queer” tell me immediately.’ Such problems did not apparently worry his mother, who was ‘well aware of her son’s sexual proclivities’. Writes Hoare: ‘It is strange to think of the Cowards sharing a house with their son’s lover; Noël’s friends certainly found it odd.’ But, as the newspapers confirm daily, mothers of ...”