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“... selected writings (also edited by Todd). Oroonoko, Behn’s late novella about an enslaved African prince shipped to South America, is included in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and is better known among contemporary American undergraduates than any other single piece of later 17th-century literature, not excluding Paradise Lost (the wonder is ...”

“... another for him to challenge the myth which traced Scottish independence back to an ancient Greek prince called Gathelus. Defeated at the Battle of Flodden, and fearful of Tudor encroachments, the Scottish élite resisted both Major’s historiography and his proposal that royal dynasties on the island should intermarry to unite ‘Greater Britain’. Not ...”

“... he has stayed, and Hawke has even defended him for his wisdom and impartiality, which is like St Peter saying he had been misinformed about Beelzebub. Then there was the republican issue. The one Australian political issue since the election of Hawke that has been brought with any force to the attention of the British was that his triumph coincided with the ...”

“... days, having run away from the domestic constrictions of Portsmouth, she had worked as a clerk at Peter Jones, then in the firm’s furniture-painting studio, then as a secretary at the Medici Society, then for MGM as a reader. She used this period, the mid-1930s, as material for the best of her novels outside the trilogies, The Doves of Venus ...”

“... billion contract and the Saudis seem to have concluded that Mark had to be rewarded as her crown prince in the way a Saudi prince would have been. This deal and others like it were so curious in terms of both rules and political convention that British embassies were, time and again, horrified to find Mark wheeling and ...”

“... attached fireworks. The finale in 1579 of the annual display in Rome to mark the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul made the engraver Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla feel ‘as if all the air in the world is filled with fireworks, and all the stars in the heavens are falling to earth – a thing truly stupendous, and marvellous to behold’. Reformation and ...”

“... newspapers carried reports of an attempt to assassinate the King. Three members of the LCS – Peter Lemaitre, a watchcase maker, George Higgins, a shopman, and John Smith, a bookseller – were arrested and charged (although never brought to trial) for an ‘ingenious’ plot to use an air-gun to fire a poison arrow at the King, either as he was walking ...”

“... organisation, possibly founded by Churchill during World War Two? What did Deza’s mentor, Sir Peter Wheeler (modelled on the Oxford professor Sir Peter Russell), do during the Spanish Civil War? And what about the bloodstain on his stairs? What is being set up by the narrator’s constant outing of ‘bogus ...”

“... common servant, but her unusual beauty and even more unusual luck brought her to the attention of Peter the Great, who made her first his mistress, then his wife, and finally his successor. She became Tsarina Catherine I, and from 1725 to 1727 she reigned as absolute monarch over an empire that already stretched from the Baltic to the Pacific. ...”

“... According​ to a gushing photo-essay published in Life magazine in 1969, Prince Karim Aga Khan was an ‘outrageously wealthy young man, written off by many as a mere playboy’, who had proved his critics wrong with a display of business acumen – a vast real-estate venture in Sardinia. Sailing across the Mediterranean on one of his yachts, the Aga Khan had fallen in love with its wind-eroded granite shorelines, pink sandy coves and velvety green waters ...”

“... I needed to change the character of his performance by restricting its size, as if I was Peter Brook called on to direct Orson Welles or Donald Wolfit (if anyone remembers that name). The obvious priority was getting rid of any possibility of an audience. If it was just the two of us there would be more prospect of damping down his reactions. There ...”

“... sound very appealing either. The gravedigger in Hamlet suggests that if the distracted Danish prince doesn’t recover his wits during his banishment to England ‘’Twill not be seen in him there. There the men are as mad as he.’ Trinculo, washed up on a Mediterranean island in The Tempest and finding the abject Caliban, immediately speculates about ...”

“... The Australian film-maker Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously is set in Djakarta shortly before the failed Communist coup of 1965. The story concerns three characters: Guy Hamilton, a half-Australian, half-American reporter working on his first big assignment for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Jill Bryant, English assistant to the British military attachè; and Billy Kwan, a dwarf-like photographer who is half-Australian, half-Chinese, and who takes secret photographs and keeps lengthy files on the other characters, especially the ones he cares about ...”

“... McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the Mirabelle for his Mirror columnists, Morgan remembers ecstatically how ...”

“... the novelist’s brother, was serving on the battleship Repulse when it was sunk, along with the Prince of Wales, by Japanese bombers. This disaster, which probably ought to have been avoided, cost a great many lives. Tayler saved himself as the great ship went down and later served in the Mediterranean. Already a bit deaf, he was rendered deafer still by ...”