“... dexterity of her pelvic floor muscles’. And did Nureyev shit on Zeffirelli’s doorstep? Christopher Hampton insists that he heard Nureyev himself saying he did. But Nureyev is often the worst source of all for his own achievements and his masseur and bodyguard, Luigi, insists it never happened, though he undermines his case somewhat by saying it ...”

“... paladin, by the name of Shambo Bolongongo, could and should be thought of, in local terms, as a ‘King Alfred and Harun al Rashid and Charlemagne all in one person’. Yet Torday remained sufficiently sober to know that he still had to have a date: no date no history, and no history no Shambo. Unhappily the elders of the Bushong, while eager to help ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... worked to consolidate the British presence in the Adriatic, training Greek mercenary regiments for King Ferdinando of the Two Sicilies and deploying them to fight brigands in Puglia – where brigandage was closely associated with subversive politics. When the Sicilian revolution broke out in 1820, Church – now leading the Neapolitan army – was a prime ...”

“... Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship with Spender from the very first seemed edgy, uncertain and uneasy, but durable for all that. Isherwood he loved, but he was tolerated, rather than loved, in return. Spender and Isherwood were spending much of their time in ...”

“... backwater into ‘the first modern society’. That Parliament should first fight against the king in 1642 and then, seven years later, not simply bring that king to trial but abolish the institution of monarchy was remarkable. That the same royal dynasty should be restored in 1660 only to be forcibly removed in 1688 ...”

“... entry into the war in Europe was that the British should give up their empire. In consequence, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out in his matchless Blood, Class and Nostalgia (1990), the British underwent a massive and soul-gelding relegation. Harold Macmillan’s remark that ‘these Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the ...”

“... humanation of a god’. But St Matthew makes it clear that the Magi had come to see the new-born King of the Jews. They had no reason to doubt that the baby was human, so if the old Magus was really doing what Steinberg supposes, it could only be to satisfy himself that the child was not a girl. In his discussion of such paintings Professor Steinberg makes ...”

“... name of morality.It would be a pity if this were attributed to a single ill-judged remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain ...”

“... futuristic. It was, in Alvarez’s phrase, ‘outer space with bad weather’. This is the story Christopher Harvie has to tell. His is an immensely important book – astonishingly, there is no other good account in print of the North Sea phenomenon which has changed the world oil market, transformed the British and Norwegian economies ...”

“... the rule of Naples, founded their own Sicilian parliament, which in April 1848 deposed the Bourbon king in Naples, Ferdinando II. But the assemblies were merely one theatre of action. By the summer of 1848, they were coming under pressure, not just from the monarchical executives in many states, but also from a range of more radical groups: networks of clubs ...”

“... he smashed up a priceless sundial in the Whitehall Privy Gardens bearing glass portraits of the king and the royal family.) Aggravated disturbances, big and small, give his poetry its character. The opening lines of ‘Tunbridge Wells’, a satire on the ‘fooles’ who flock to the spa town, are casually respectable but unmistakably dirty: ‘Att five ...”

“... of. I reckon.’ ‘They’ had nothing to fear. The crowds who thronged central London saluted King, Parliament, Churchill, even allies with cordial appreciation, and were so harmless that the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, were allowed to slip out around 11 p.m. to mix with the crowd around Buckingham Palace. (Margaret recalled that ‘everyone ...”

“... of biographical fact but the artistic shaping of it. No one would accuse Peter Gwyn, author of The King’s Cardinal, of confusing life with art. His intentions are too austere to risk that imputation. Although his important and very long book proclaims itself a ‘biography’ of Thomas Wolsey, it fulfils few of the expectations raised by the term. There is ...”

“... dedicated to Lord Burghley, De republica Anglorum instauranda, with an allegorical opening; or Christopher Ocland’s Anglorum Praelia, an account of English battles from 1327 to 1558 with approbatory letters from members of the Privy Council, which the Recorder of London ordered should be read in schools throughout the kingdom (as seems in fact to have ...”