“... nature and essence, whether he is painting the naked young or the fully clothed octogenarian Queen of England. As for Freud’s many self-portraits, it is less their gleefully depicted decay that is striking than their self-celebration, their implicit stance of artist as hero. The worst is The Painter Surprised by a ...”

“... reflection’ of the eponymous hero. Or that Virgilia – who stubbornly refuses to yield to her mother-in-law in the small but significant argument they have about her leaving the house in Act One, and speaks before her in the crucial encounter with Coriolanus in Act Five – is a mere nonentity, who ‘must submit to Volumnia’s demands, her speeches, her ...”

“... seems both British and appropriate. Neither the mountain’s Tibetan name, Chomolungma (‘goddess mother of the snows’), nor the Nepali Sagarmatha, preferred by Sir George Everest, Surveyor-General of India 1830-43, has caught on. At least we have been spared the name of Sir George’s successor, Andrew Waugh, who calculated that Everest, at 29,028 feet and ...”

“... basin, hemmed in to the north by hills. The atmosphere was already thickening in Tudor times, as Queen Elizabeth declared herself ‘greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and smoke of sea-coles’. Then and in the 17th century, industry was blamed; wood-smoke from lime-burning and fumes from coal ...”

“... ducal dynasty. The man put in charge of Bavaria in 791 was Gerold, brother of Charlemagne’s late queen, Hildegard, and uncle of the three sons destined to be his heirs. The revolt of a fourth son whose mother was not Hildegard was hardly coincidental. Supported by ‘a very large number ...”

“... of family Chester was well-supplied. He was the son of a Brooklyn dentist, Edward Kallman. His mother Bertha was a cultivated woman, who had acted in Yiddish theatre. She died when Chester was small, his father remarried, and the boy was largely brought up by his grandmother. His grandmother’s name was Bobby. His stepmother’s name was Syd. (In their ...”

“... but also his worries and rages (‘Last night, alone, I had a satanic fit of rage against mother for her grumbling and fault-finding, and figured a scene in which I swept the mantelpiece with my arm and then rushed out of doors or cut my throat’), and his nurtured private sarcasms in later life on bêtes noires such as Noël Annan (‘He really is a ...”

“... guilty to stealing a television from a Comet in North London during the riots of 7 August. Her mother said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The tragedy is that you are all of previous good ...”

“... Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of Antony and Cleopatra. The version put on at Stratford opened with Antony making love to Cleopatra, his ...”

“... Blue Hotel’, which Huston did not use but liked enough to give him another project, The African Queen. Later Agee collaborated with Charles Laughton on the screenplay of Davis Grubb’s extraordinary novel about the discovery of evil in childhood, The Night of the Hunter. He died in 1955, of a heart attack, aged ...”

“... as a specimen of the decline of a certain vein of political subversion, partly nurtured in the Queen Caroline affair of 1820-1, into simple illicitness, as he became a full-time publisher of pornography in the 1830s. Cannon’s links with the orthodox Spenceans and the breakaway group under Wedderburn, though apparently ...”

“... during the arraignment of the Earl of Essex for treason in 1601 when the earl’s antagonist, the queen’s leading minister Robert Cecil, secretly present in the court, stepped from behind an arras to deliver the impassioned speech that ruined the earl’s defence of his rebellion? Which of the assumptions of disguise by ...”

“... Argus. His childhood was privileged and isolated; in 1953, aged eight, he was taken on the Queen Elizabeth to see the Coronation. Argus was rich, powerful and ‘fundamentally dishonest’, with the directors regularly trading in assets which they bought from and sold to the company, always at a profit to ...”

“... sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by ...”

“... smiling all the time. It was almost embarrassing, he admitted, to be so ‘normal’, to have a mother called Sunny and a father who worked for the Department of Agriculture and left the house each morning in a ten-gallon cowboy hat. The obvious contrast between the sylvan dream of his upbringing – Douglas firs, rainbow trout – and the nightmarishness ...”