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“... shame.’ Wallis Simpson and Edward Windsor on their wedding day, 3 June 1937, photographed by Cecil Beaton. The ‘abdication crisis’, as it became known, in which George’s elder brother, the Prince of Wales, resigned the crown after less than a year as Edward VIII, is now almost out of living memory. It has become as much myth as history. The most ...”

“... interval between the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on ...”

“... young aristocrat (he was 19 when Venus and Adonis appeared) who was also the ward of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. This is the way ambitious Elizabethan poets got on in the world: they found a generous aristocratic patron, whose taste, praised in a lavish dedication, in turn constituted a marketable endorsement. That this worked for Shakespeare, at least ...”

“... furtively seeks out the camera’s gaze. He is posed by Man Ray, displaying his beautiful hands; Cecil Beaton photographs him smoking opium, in a sepia haze. He is portrayed by Philippe Halsman as a god with six arms, bearing pen, book, cigarette, scissors: caught between versions of himself, he becomes Cocteaux. As if refracted by these multiple ...”

“... Lord Protector, who favours her elder half-sister, Lady Mary, the future (Catholic) queen. William Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards Elizabeth, mindful of the role history may have in store for her. Shardlake is retained as one of her lawyers. Now 47, he is lonely, world-weary, and bored of drawing up conveyances and wills (perhaps as ...”

“... and sciences’, created a corporate sponsor for knowledge-gathering. One of its founding members, Robert Boyle, a Hudson’s Bay Company shareholder as well as an Irish plantation owner and an EIC director, wrote questionnaires to guide the RSL’s factors, who eagerly supplied the society and other metropolitan institutions with travelogues, dictionaries of ...”

“... its furrows gradually deepened, the face was captured by some remarkable photographers, including Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Jane Bown, and a string of artists. The vigorous scribble of Feliks Topolski naturally found him a good subject, as did the heroic sculptural instincts of Henry Moore, who drew Auden’s skin from memory on hearing of his death ...”

“... to have struck many as both wild and a bit silly, ‘buffoonish, half-absurd, half-serious’ in Cecil Day-Lewis’s account. Rosamund Lehmann wrote wearily to a friend at Christmas in 1932: ‘That absolute lunatic Stephen Spender is still with us … he has been booming, droning, pouring, bursting out of doors like a northeaster, into rooms like a fiery ...”

“... the figure. But the notion that a friendly press can deliver votes has never been very convincing. Cecil King wasn’t the first person to see that newspapers could accelerate or slow up a trend, but never reverse or create one. The popular press, as Koss notes, encouraged a volatile public opinion which it could provoke and stimulate but seldom guide once the ...”

“... Empire goes, much else goes with it. This was not lost on perceptive contemporaries. Lord Hugh Cecil remarked in his popular book Conservatism of 1912: ‘It may be said that many men are brought to support the Conservative rather than any other political party, because they believe its policy on foreign and colonial matters are wise and ...”

“... la Mare, although his illustrious admirers have ranged from Virginia Woolf to Derek Walcott, from Robert Frost to W.H. Auden, from Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of ...”

“... later reflected, that he had had an experienced mentor to call on for advice – someone such as Robert Louis Stevenson, who ‘had always seemed to me “one of the family”’. Greene was distantly related to RLS through his mother’s cousin. ‘Names which appeared in his Collected Letters were photographs in our family album. In the nursery we played ...”

“... York this season is the Armani retrospective at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and ...”

“... star playing a murderer if his character was seen to have been provoked. Bogart’s co-producer, Robert Lord, brokered the agreement: Bogart wouldn’t play a serial killer. He’d be a suspect, but someone else would be found guilty of those murders. However, he would crack under the pressure of suspicion and end up murdering his girlfriend. So in one ...”

“... expected to find one. But there were ten: one succinct W.H.D. Rouse prose translation and one Robert Graves, in prose and song, both in paperback; two blank verse Robert Fagles in solid covers; one rhythmic Richmond Lattimore with a lengthy new introduction;* and three hardback copies of the new Stephen Mitchell ...”