“... she saw a man whom she might save from his own flaws. If Byron was no Darcy, Annabella was no Elizabeth Bennet. In their courtship she was more of a Catherine Morland, naively in thrall to a fictional worldview and unable to see beyond it. If there was a literary parallel for the tortuous manipulations that surrounded the marriage it was Les Liaisons ...”

“... thrashing the air with white sticks, while failing to land a single blow on a Struwwelpeter clown-king bent on slow-puncture abdication by photo opportunity, a different costume or a different country every night. This man changes the rules of the game if he is in danger of losing a piece. Nothing is true, not now. Horrors, incubated over many years: the ...”

“... in a male, homosocial elite, owes much to the ethos and economy that grew up around the court of King James VI and I. By 1605-8, the likely date of Timon, the Scottish king had been on the English throne for several years, and a pattern had been established. He bought the loyalty of the nobility and the affection of ...”

“... was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is ...”

“... in 2020 Sotheby’s sold three stray leaves for £378,000 – to his Cambridge college, King’s, complete with a memorable tagline of his own devising. These esoteric writings demonstrated that Newton was not after all ‘the first of the Age of Reason, he was the last of the magicians’.There’s something to be said for this opinion. In her ...”

“... In April​ 1970, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick – both aged 53, married for 21 years – had just been on holiday together in Italy with their 13-year-old daughter, Harriet. Hardwick and Harriet had come home to New York, where Hardwick taught at Barnard College; Lowell had gone to Oxford to take up a fellowship at All Souls ...”

“... they are by birth. They cannot even, as contemporaries sometimes urged, drop part of the claim. Elizabeth of England tried to make Mary give up her claim to the English throne – understandably, since it was a better one than her own – and many of Charles Edward’s Scottish supporters urged him to settle for Scotland only. But a dynasty’s claims, if ...”

“... inhabitants of that same country, and not only in England. Across the Channel they wondered why a king should choose to marry his mistress. (The whole point is, however, that Anne never was Henry’s mistress, whereas her sister Mary was. When Henry was accused of having slept not only with Anne’s sister but with her mother, he disarmingly ...”

“... the pesky new medium to ‘crawl back into its tube’. It all went wrong. The 1957 film, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the ...”

“... whether in his duelling, in the hectoring tone of a few of his letters both to his wife and to Elizabeth Barry, or in the domineering machismo of poems like “The Advice” or “Phyllis, be gentler, I advise”, and his sexual satires’. ‘Machismo’ is the appropriately damning word. Treglown warns against ‘a modern tendency to generalise ...”

“... novel in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is ...”

“... Europe. And there should be feedback from history to current politics. We have recently seen a sub king oust his overlord: he has taken power for such an immense area that he needs sub-sub-kings under him, to express the full range of the cultural and economic diversity of his principality. In many parts of the world as well as at home, we need to modify the ...”

“... who had arrived in England in the 1580s, but had earlier been sent to South America by the French king.) White’s most decorated Pict has heraldic animal heads on chest and knees, but it is still possible to think of them as tattoos. Le Moyne’s maiden is pretty, blonde, and decorated all over with botanical studies that could have come from a Book of ...”

“... famous trio of this time, William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Devonshire, his wife Georgiana and Lady Elizabeth Foster, concealed their goings-on and their miscellaneous progeny in the grand seclusion of Chatsworth and Devonshire House. Less socially-exalted, the Hamiltons and Nelson were at once more notorious and far more vulnerable. All three were outsiders of ...”

“... Someone famous was sure to turn up on each page: Joshua Reynolds, perhaps, or Mrs Siddons, or mad King George III. The diary gave ‘fresh colours to the pale and faded portraits of past ages’, a reviewer for the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote. It wasn’t long before readers began rating the diary above the novels, and when further extracts covering ...”