“... albeit strong Unionists both – have been willing to go as far as Law took his party: telling the King’s Private Secretary, in January 1914, that if the Liberal Government failed to call an election on the Home Rule Bill, they must ‘prepare for the consequences of civil war’? It was this letter, Asquith told Redmond a week later, that had convinced the ...”

“... part in Harold’s sensorium, as does the noble house of Marks and Spencer. For a while all is King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. But the Beggar Maid, in this instance, is sharp-witted enough to become uneasy when confronted with the full blast of Harold’s adoration. What she does not know is that a specific kind of loss has consumed Harold’s past and ...”

“... Graham Greene, who fed her on oysters and smoked salmon, and took her to see Charlie’s Aunt and King Lear. When the film star Maureen Swanson wanted 18th-century Chinese wallpaper in her dining-room, but found she couldn’t afford it, Jocelyn Rickards was commissioned to create an oriental effect with her brushes. After two days of painting lotus lilies ...”

“... Yet all the time he knows she is ‘hurrying to join him’. Creating an imaginary fresco of King Candaules awaiting his wife on the nuptial couch, Anthony Powell observes that the expectant monarch has in him ‘something of all men’, his spouse absorbed in her own rituals ‘something of all women’. In the legend, Candaules dies for thinking his ...”

“... him. The Victorians, who lapped up his history of religion and a hagiography of his ‘seraphic’ Margaret Blagge, burnished his pious image. But Sylva shows us quite a different Evelyn, a man who was driven by curiosity, ‘living for ingenuity’ and could even make a roomful of naval officials ‘die almost with laughing’. Luckily, Pepys was there, at ...”

“... Party is never happier than when Labour has a unilateral disarmer as its leader. In 1986 Margaret Thatcher arrived at her party’s annual conference in Bournemouth with a spring in her step, despite having endured months of bruising political infighting in the aftermath of the Westland affair. She promptly fell over a manhole cover and sprained her ...”

“... to attempt the virtually impossible task of getting to the right of New Labour was anyway futile. Margaret Thatcher said, not in her ‘Mummy returns’ speech at Plymouth during the election campaign but shortly before her fall in 1990: ‘Do not say it is time for something else! Thatcherism is not for a decade. It is for centuries!’ That showed not only ...”

“... and kill them. If the lion really beat the unicorn, then the Crown pressing on the head of the king of beasts alone would destroy him. Which it has done and is doing. It is here also that we find his profound critique of ‘cyclical’ cosmologies and their absurd pentagrams and gyres, which he replaces by a truly human version of ‘eternal ...”

“... sea – prompted, one poem suggests, by a baleful look shot by the poet from her pram – Florence Margaret Smith lived in her Palmers Green house; from her mid-twenties, nicknamed Stevie after the jockey Steve Donoghue, she lived there alone with her aunt, producing three novels and a torrent of poems and articles, and working as a secretary at Newnes and ...”

“... York’s good fairy – the one with the magic wand, or the dividing rod – was of course Margaret Thatcher. In a little bit of trickery quite dazzling in its confusions, York sets out to equate the Thatcher ‘peasant revolt’ – the revolt against high-table paternalism by a winsome band of ‘clever outsiders’ – with the rise of a certain ...”

“... was an isolated figure was increased by a series of personal tragedies. In 1896 he had married Margaret Gladstone, a fellow socialist from a prosperous middle-class family, who was engaged in charitable work in the East End. The couple had six children. In February 1910 their son David died, aged five, from diphtheria. Eight days later, MacDonald’s ...”

“... mean passing up the particular social opportunity then on offer, and later, when Mr Ramus the King’s page invited him to St James’s, he noted: ‘Formerly I should have jumped at such an opening. I am now too far advanced. Yet I may go.’ It’s like Crusoe feeling he can’t use the ship-wrecked money but then deciding to keep it, accelerated to the ...”

“... their church windows, and cared not a fart for any orders of the Parliament not confirmed by the king. Images were not only objects of belief: they were visible symbols of the unity of communities, and an unsuccessful symbol of unity is a symbol of disunity. Images were not an issue, like predestination, which authorities could ever hope to confine to the ...”

“... chivalry stands contempt. A pleasanter irony, also involving chivalry, arises in the story of Margaret Nicholson, a seamstress, who in 1786 approached George III with a written petition and, concealed beneath it, a knife. ‘The king was saved by his exceedingly fine manners,’ for as he took the petition he bowed ...”

“... translation, with none of the trumpeting which announced his earlier triumphs, Friday and The Erl King. All his publishers have managed to come up with is an ambiguous commendation from Genet: ‘An exceptional, incomparable novel’. Le Roi des Aulnes is the only novel to have won the Prix Goncourt by unanimous decision, but Les Météores has enjoyed less ...”