“... 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 ...”

“... had been a loyal henchman of Cromwell’s, but as dean at Worcester, appointed by the Catholic Queen Mary in 1553, he spent lavishly on renewing the architectural splendour of his cathedral after Protestant iconoclasm. As his work took shape, it looked for a year or two as if old Catholicism (or new ...”

“... to be paired while at the Theatre School. After graduation ‘they remained an informal king and queen of their generation. Lidochka was impulsive, headstrong, full of vitality. George was detached, dreamy, mysterious.’ Kendall calls him ‘the revolutionary Pierrot’ to Lidia’s bold ‘flapper edition of ...”

“... Manhattan. She turned tricks and occasionally picked pockets. ‘She was always the most glamorous queen on the street,’ the performance artist Agosto Machado said. ‘Whatever stoop she sat on was like the throne area and you could approach.’ She set her sights on acting. When a friend suggested she take ...”

“... the 1740s, the young bluestocking Elizabeth Robinson (later Montagu) was appalled to find that her mother had read and disapproved of a flippant letter she had written to her sister. Nor cou’d I imagine that I was writing what anyone wou’d read except [Sarah] herself; if I had thought so, I give you my word, I shou’d have been much more reserved both in ...”

“... The​ Queen’s Dolls’ House, designed by Edwin Lutyens, was put on display at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. A twee descendant of Victoria and Albert’s Crystal Palace, three feet tall, it advertised the ingenuity of Britain’s manufacturers to the world ...”

“... Arabian Nights, and the success story of Ali Baba and the romance of the young man and the fairy queen echo the extravagant and often sly fairytales – ‘Puss in Boots’, ‘The White Cat’ – that were being retrieved and written down in France by Charles Perrault and Mme d’Aulnoy in the 1690s. D’Aulnoy ...”

“... her charming, conniving father, Eugene, a plumber who enjoyed baseball and jazz, once cheated his mother-in-law out of enough money to buy himself a boat, and that her mother, Mary, a stout woman with a ‘boneless, soft prettiness’ and the ‘scarcest of eyebrows’, was a devout Presbyterian who believed that to get ...”

“... old one, older even than Duncan himself. He was born in Oakland about ten hours before his birth mother died, possibly from Spanish flu. His father, a railroad engineer, was stricken with grief and refused help from relatives; within a year Duncan and his seven siblings were ‘effectively orphaned’. The Symmeses had been told by an astrologer that their ...”

“... where Britten was living at the time, and play crashing discords on the piano. Eventually, his mother came and took him away. The effect of this story, which Carpenter appears to have included simply for its strangeness, is suddenly to make us aware of how immersed we have become in the enclosed universe of the great man’s life. Biographies often give ...”

“... took Victoria to be the first constitutional monarch, a view derived in part from Bagehot and the Queen’s own campaign to present herself as a simple widow bearing responsibilities beyond her strength and suffering pomp out of necessity. More recently, there has been a move towards viewing Victoria as the last ...”

“... was performing for Sheridan on £12 a week. They married after the death of his first wife (the mother of his daughters) in 1815, when she was 37 and he was 79. She was trounced as a predator and lampooned as a parvenue. Disraeli portrayed her as the flashy Mrs Million in Vivian Grey. London had known nothing like her since Nell Gwyn, who was likewise an ...”

“... a fake telegram lures him back to the family home in Austria for a supposedly brief visit to his mother, who is ‘weak in the head like a dairy cow’. Pabst has the necessary visas and a first-class Atlantic passage booked; nothing can go wrong, he thinks. The house in Austria, the Dreiturm Castle, doesn’t even have one tower, let alone three, and ...”