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“... 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 ...”

“... pay homage to the Virgin, Elizabeth Cameron translated into the vital and all-forgiving gothic mother-goddess. News of engagements, marriages and accouchements filled his letters. He even dreamed he was going to have a baby, an amusing revelation, he wrote to Mrs Cameron, ‘of my own mind and character’, and came to depend on his ‘coop’ of ...”

“... Famous Impostors (1910) included chapters on royal pretenders, pages of wild speculation that Queen Elizabeth I was in fact a boy from the town of Bisley, and a chapter on women who masqueraded as men, including a subset whom Stoker deemed the most implausible impostors of all: women who masqueraded as military men. The ...”

“... over the fireplace are far from being the daubs I thought they were but reputedly come from Queen Elizabeth I’s state barge and may even have accompanied Drake round the world on the Golden Hind.22 February. Jocelyn Herbert’s 80th birthday party at the Royal College of Art, the Senior Common Room packed with ...”

“... dedicating a book on the events of 1399 to her rebellious former favourite, the Earl of Essex. The queen found it seditious even to broach the topic of a past tyrannicide; Essex’s supporters planned to use a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II as a signal for his uprising to begin. After having Essex ...”