“... escape with as little human interaction as possible. The cab rolled up outside the BBC studios on Queen Street, and he was just about to hurry away when the driver crooked a finger to bring him closer. ‘With your height,’ he said, ‘and the weight of your chin, I’d recommend a hat with a broader brim.’ David ...”

“... been hospitalised, and reported regularly for electroshock therapy years after his release. His mother also had depression, and one of his nephews had schizophrenia. But for mid-century American psychologists investigating the mental health of Don’s children, nothing was as salient as Mimi’s perfectionism. Everyone knew that she’d had a dozen children ...”

“... Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music ...”

“... it was tricky to pin him down. His father was a yeoman with a substantial interest in brewing, his mother was a gentlewoman. He was thus himself a bit of a hybrid, and would always remain so. The accounts of Our Lady’s Gild of Boston gave their comfortably middle-aged attorney (he was now in his thirties) the gentleman’s title of master. Cromwell was the ...”

“... with one of those monosyllabically titled best-sellers filled with fashion tips (‘The Queen would not agree to extravagant expenditure on her clothes and neither did I’) wine-dark prose and exotic settings, as others on their uppers have done before her. She writes to Bob in 1981 after their final ...”

“... to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission’. The advice of The Mother’s Assistant and Young Lady’s Friend was ‘Always conciliate,’ and The Lady’s Amaranth stated that a woman governs by ‘persuasion ... The empire of woman is an empire of softness ... her commands are caresses.’ As with Ambrose Heath’s idea of ...”

“... to a public row (and legal action) between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their mother was. The two things people know about Antonia White are that she wrote Frost in May and that she was a disgraceful mother. Some doubtless know it the other way around. Mud sticks. And Chitty’s Now to My ...”

“... by Peter Mil-ward, Hughes probes Shakespeare’s Catholicism. Following Milward, he notes that his mother’s family, the Ardens, were strongly Catholic, and that the head of the Warwickshire branch, Edward Arden, was first implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I, then tried and executed. As a result, official persecution of Catholics in the area was ...”

“... with wit and malice, is full of the great and famous (the really great and famous such as the Queen, wearing ‘something one could buy in a dress-shop in the high street in High Wycombe’). The selected two hundred letters are culled from around ten thousand. I imagine that in those left unculled there is more about ...”

“... public response to an article in the Saturday Review, then by the dedication of the dictionary to Queen Victoria, on the occasion of her Diamond Jubilee. This latter event is delayed in Winchester’s narrative by Chapter 7, on the suppliers of quotations, ‘The Hermit and the Murderer – and Hereward Thimbleby ...”

“... Her father, Albert Barney, was a millionaire in the railroad business from Dayton, Ohio; her mother, the flamboyant socialite Alice Pike Barney, a dilettante painter who studied with Whistler and not so secretly despised her philistine husband. The mother seems to have endowed Natalie with her own artiness, narcissism ...”

“... in the local cinema in Manchester, as against his less glamorous day job as a tobacconist? Was his mother really a music-hall starlet known as the Beautiful Belle Burgess? Biswell kindly remarks that no lady of that name appears on any of the playbills he’s examined. There are at least some facts about Burgess that are known and that matter to his ...”

“... did happen to Fanny Burney. She was swept, as Second Keeper of the Robes, into the train of Queen Charlotte, George III’s wife, when she too was in her thirties and famous as the author of two bestsellers, Cecilia and her rumbustious, read-on first novel, Evelina, which Oxford has now reissued as a World’s ...”

“... into the gallery of Westminster Hall. Among them appeared the cream of London society, headed by Queen Charlotte herself, elegant in fawn-coloured satin and a modest splash of diamonds, and flanked by three of her daughters. With three hundred guards keeping the passages clear, the peers of the realm marched in according ...”

“... and the crisp, American housewifeliness of Alvarez’s memoir. But of her ‘Ariel’ persona – queen, priestess, magician’s girl, red-haired woman who eats men like air, woman in white, woman in love, earth mother, moon goddess – there is no trace in the photographs. The fault may ...”