“... dramatic, case-by-case study of a family in crisis. On the other hand, he isn’t immune to what Robert Frost once called ‘the august occasions of the state’, and this makes his drama all the stronger. In Episode 3, when George VI is dead and the aforementioned David turns up at Marlborough House to have tea with Queen Mary, the atmosphere is daintily ...”

“... Brotton offers sensitive readings of plays that veer between crude caricatures of Islam (as in Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon, which contains a cameo by a fire-breathing brass head of the ‘God Mahomet’) and more nuanced or informed portrayals, including the uneasy and shifting identities inhabited by Othello – the Christian Moor who, at ...”

“... another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales, out of the Tower of London and beheaded them on Tower Hill. On 15 June the rebels and the king met again, this time at Smithfield. Their leader, Wat Tyler, failed to doff his cap, instead taking the king’s arm and shaking it roughly in ...”

“... is dismayed to notice, when his thoughts turn to ending it all – in the style of Hart Crane or Robert Maxwell – that, wherever he jumps from, he will probably only find more superyacht beneath him. A woman’s hair may be ‘a sort of aureate beige’ or ‘dyed a maximal black’. Pleasures are technical, liquid and faddish; they are afforded by ...”

“... Barry was an eccentric, seen ‘in his worst (that is to say, his maddest) days’, according to Robert Southey, in a dirt and paint-encrusted green baize coat with a tired old wig. But a bequest was the best hope for the two women, whose other male relatives had proven unreliable. Margaret’s brother, John, apprenticed to a Dublin lawyer, had already ...”

“... political turmoil, though their precise role remains murky. The American hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a friend of Nigel Farage, was accused of aiding the Leave campaign with data analytics expertise, via the now defunct company Cambridge Analytica. Hedge funds were generous backers of both the Leave and Remain campaigns in 2016, but both sides ...”

“... company he wanted to join (the straight-acting insiders of the new moment, like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and Frank O’Hara). A successful commercial artist, homosexual, Catholic, working-class – the grounds for exclusion, or self-exclusion, were multiple. Warhol’s parents were Ruthenians from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father came to ...”

“... sanctuary in music. Surgeons took pride in aprons so dirty they could have stood up on their own; Robert Liston, who pioneered the use of anaesthesia, stored his instruments up his sleeve between surgeries to keep them warm. The mortality rate among medical students – who were liable to let the knife slip – was high: the surgeon John Abernethy concluded ...”

“... sections for solo voice – ‘counterverses’ – and the full ensemble. Star soloists such as Robert Philips, who John Foxe said ‘was so notable a singing man (wherein he gloried) that wheresoever he came, the best and longest song, with most counterverses in it, should be set up at his coming,’ were invited to sing the reduced-voice ...”

“... added treasures to the Louvre. The same holds true for some of Manion’s female husbands. Robert Shurtliff, an American soldier in the War of Independence, also known as Deborah Sampson, was celebrated for acting out of the ‘purest patriotism’ and without ‘any selfish motives’. When the British soldier James Gray revealed that he had once been ...”

“... Jannet Thompson et al. On a blank page a note records that the book was given to James Stanger by Robert Fisher in 1662, ‘in steade of one that he had of mine when he went away from Thorntwhait’. Typically, it seems that The Soules Exaltation remained in the same village for centuries: books were mobile, passing from hand to hand, but they rarely ...”

“... have missed on previous occasions. Two of her Partisan Review essays – on the cancellation of Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954 and on a Beat poets’ reading at Columbia in 1958 – stand out for me in this respect. Like a good liberal – ‘I was against both communism and McCarthyism. They were enemies of each other, but I was the ...”

“... ancient sources contradict one another on the details of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was ...”

“... later, he concludes: ‘Who cares?’ In order to imagine the expertise of the legendary angler Robert Pashley (‘the Wizard of the Wye’), who ‘caught more than ten thousand salmon from the Wye at an average weight of 16 pounds’, Fort wades the river to try his luck, only to trip on a rock and fall in the drink. ‘I took this as a sign that the ...”

“... of resistance: he sided with Douglas Lute and General Cartwright, against Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, in telling Obama in 2009 to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan immediately. Again, in the case of Libya, Biden made the right arguments (though again Obama declined to follow them) in opposing the overthrow of Gaddafi. It will take the same ...”