“... movies, novels and documentaries. Writers including Robert Penn Warren and Sinclair Lewis (All the King’s Men and It Can’t Happen Here); the directors Robert Rossen, Ken Burns and Stephen Zaillian; and the actors John Goodman and Sean Penn have all grappled with the Kingfish – Long’s nickname, after a black character ...”

“... of Oxford, ranger of Snowdon Forest, or high steward of Windsor, Bristol, Reading, Abingdon, King’s Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Wallingford, Tewkesbury and St Albans – that he didn’t manage to visit Kenilworth once during the first three years he owned it. Despite the elaborate heraldry he had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an ...”

“... combines politics with reflections on the place of education in public life. In one play the King of Navarre is whimsically transformed into a bachelor and rechristened Ferdinand; he retreats from court not for fear of Spanish-funded Catholic plots but to lead a quartet of abstemious students. He experiences a crisis of conscience at breaking an ...”

“... in the engagement, or ‘troth-plighting’, of their daughter Mary to one of their apprentices, Stephen Belott. Some years later Belott sued Mountjoy for an unpaid dowry of £60, and Shakespeare was among those called to give evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. He did so on 11 May 1612, though – somewhat conveniently for Mountjoy – he ...”

“... at Harvard, they are ‘Puritans’ (though in his preface he blames this on his copy-editor); Stephen Tomkins, who is British, prefers lower case. In America, the name carries more baggage than in England and Scotland, and might mean any English colonist in New England, where industry and piety marched in lockstep. But the use of a ‘P’ still suggests ...”

“... of each sex’. But this papers over a crucial slippage between the serial experience of Tiresias (king for a day, queen for a day) and the simultaneous marriage (a.k.a. bigamy) of the person who has, and is, both a husband and a wife. This tension between serial and simultaneous bisexuality is crucial to the argument about monogamy and promiscuity that runs ...”

“... that would most help to make her legal case for separation’. Whatever she told her lawyer, Stephen Lushington, it had a galvanising effect. From that point, he recalled, ‘I considered a reconciliation impossible.’ Whether it was the incest, the sodomy, adultery, drugs or Byron’s episodes of apparent near psychosis, it shook Lushington to the ...”

“... Szakall.Before Auden came on the scene Chester had taken the fancy of a New York financier, Robert King (‘not his real name’). King duly enrolled as a patient with Dr Kallman, and after a little bridgework had broken the ice, invited the dentist to supper at the Astor Roof. There was presumably some routine orthodontic ...”

“... Henry II sought to limit ecclesiastical privileges, which had expanded under his predecessor, Stephen of Blois (1135-54), and to re-establish royal authority in the kingdom. To do so, it was necessary ‘to recollect and carefully write down’ the ‘ancient customs’ that had governed the law during the reign of Henry I (1100-35). Only in January ...”

“... with tears and groans’. Even the Spaniards took off their caps, as befitted the passage of a king. The chronicler touched Huayna Capac’s finger and reported that it was ‘like that of a wooden statue, it was so hard and strong’. The last reliable record of Huayna Capac came 111 years after his death, when an Augustinian friar reported in 1638 that ...”

“... who produced paintings the politics of which were far from evident. In 1949, his major patron, Stephen Clark, returned the painting Conference at Night because his wife thought it ‘looked too much like a Communist gathering’. Such experiences must have confirmed Hopper’s reluctance to speak about the content of his pictures. About this one, he would ...”

“... made it through. Leopold McClintock, despatched by Lady Franklin to search for her husband on King William Island, tried six times to penetrate Bellot Strait during the summer of 1858 before continuing his journey by dog-sled. It took Roald Amundsen three years – including two winters lodged in the ice – to complete the first full transit of the ...”

“... of America and its role in the world. Currently led, if that is the word, by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming ...”

“... Piper makes us more directly aware of a great architectural tradition burning up,’ Stephen Spender said. Piper – always, temperamentally, happy to comply – went on tour around the country to document burned-out churches as well as picturesque buildings deemed to be under threat, including Windsor Castle, producing a series of dark ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”