“... has strange results. It is at least not obvious that the proposition ‘If Queen Victoria thought Prince Albert handsome, King George V collected postage stamps’ expresses a causal truth entirely on its own. I have to say that I disagree with Honderich not only on this point but over almost every opinion that I have so far attributed to him. To begin ...”

“... freedom from convention. He farmed, traded with the Masai and became a white hunter, taking the Prince of Wales out twice on safari. Karen Blixen writes to her mother that ‘he has a magical effect on me; never have I ever known such a feeling of happiness as I have in his company, it is as if I get light and air after having been confined in a room.’ He ...”

“... Polish rebel exiled in Paris, one of Custine’s many Polish friends: Chopin and the exiled leader Prince Czartoryski were others. Gurowski ran up considerable debts, and much to Custine’s amusement, eloped with the Spanish Infanta. Custine’s Polish connections may have played a large part in his decision to travel to Russia, but the journey was at least ...”

“... Bryant, in 1987, though other problems intervened and the volume is only now brought to harbour by Peter Marshall, the pre-eminent authority on the late 18th-century British Empire, who took on the task in 2011. The lengthy wait allows Marshall to pay sad tribute to the general editor of the series, Paul Langford, who died in 2015. Independently, Langford’s ...”

“... of Shadows, though very readable and clear in detail, lacks the overall narrative clarity of Peter Hopkirk’s studies of the subject, most notably The Great Game (1990). The essential truth about Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia is that, despite the imperialist fantasies entertained by some of the Game’s players, there was never all that much at ...”

“... a poster from 1894 for Hamlet. Pared down until he occupies only a third of the narrow format, the Prince of Denmark appears side-on contemplating Yorick’s skull, bone white against Hamlet’s black-robed profile, the pointy toes of his slippers, the high-collared cape and headdress giving him an unmistakeably Aesthetic silhouette. Like the tea-cosy ...”

“... themes get broached and explored. The title of Peacock Pie is taken from ‘The Song of the Mad Prince’, which reworks ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’:Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?      The old King to the sparrow:Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?      Rust to the harrow:Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?      Where rests she now her head,Bathed in ...”

“... time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should ...”

“... town plan leading up Regent Street to the Regent’s Park. The view south was to culminate in the Prince Regent’s Palace at Carlton House. Long before the work was finished, however, Prinnie got bored and decided he wanted to move to Buckingham House. Carlton House was dismantled and the materials as far as possible reused to upgrade Buckingham House to ...”

“... most inspired dramatic fragment, ‘Rusalka’, the story of a miller’s daughter seduced by a prince, who drowns herself and becomes a ‘cold powerful rusalka’, seeking revenge. Again the theme appears banal but its suggestiveness is highly penetrating and poetic. It breaks off just at the moment when ‘revenge’, in the conventional sense, might ...”

“... of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity.’ Nancy Mitford, although persuaded by her husband, Peter Rodd, to don a black shirt and gush in print on behalf of TPOF (The Poor Old Führer), was already marshalling the Union Jack Shirts for her novel Wigs on the Green. But it was not until 1938 that P.G. Wodehouse brought on Sir Roderick Spode and his Black ...”

“... of a common Russian sensibility such as Tolstoy had imagined in his dancing scene’. Since Peter the Great, however, this ‘common Russian sensibility’ always contained a European admixture, and Figes criticises those – Rilke, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf – who swallowed whole the myth of a completely indigenous ‘Russian soul’. All the great ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”

“... teacher, with whom she has ‘tremendous rows about her progressive approaches to teaching’. Peter’s Benthamite training has rendered him ‘traditional ... conformist ... reductionist ... mechanist’ (another lexicon of Holbrookian dirty words). Psychologically Peter has ‘buried the boy within him, very ...”

“... most straightforward method is that of the History of 12th-Century Western Philosophy, edited by Peter Dronke. We just haven’t read all the material, insists Dronke. Enormous amounts of evidence lie hidden in manuscripts, or in bad early editions. The whole network of intellectual relations in the Middle Ages still needs to be charted, strand by ...”