“... extraordinary chapter caused consternation among many of the proof-readers: as Elizabeth Jordan said later, it ‘proved to be the explosion of a bomb-shell on our literary hearthstone’. With the privilege of a leading position, she could elaborate ‘facts’ altogether freely, and had the old-maid aunt, rejuvenating to 34, acquire (in her own account) a ...”

“... irresponsible, insensitive, feckless. He never paused to consider the implications of what he said and did. They put nothing past the mesmeric influence on him of “that woman”.’ When it’s another royal duchess’s turn to be out of favour, Harris shelters behind an editorial in the Daily Telegraph: ‘But it is interesting and significant that the ...”

“... dexterity in anticipating criticism allows. The title is, of course, a sidelong reference to Edward Said’s Orientalism. Cannadine thinks it is time we ‘reoriented Orientalism’ by recognising that the British understanding of the native peoples of the Empire did not automatically rest on the construction of an inferior, and naturally ...”

“... in those dancing footsteps, by building up party scenes out of scraps of dialogue:– So I said to her, you just go ahead and be pathological …– So I said to them when we got back to Florence, of course there’s no place I’d rather live than Siena if I had my analyst there with me …– So he ...”

“... his time as Prince of Wales, substantiated most of the criticisms levelled against him as King Edward VIII, and painted a pathetic picture of his later years as Duke of Windsor, the ‘weary, wayward, wandering ghost’, shuffling with rootless opulence from resort to resort, getting ‘more tanned and more tired’. The latest contribution from the legion ...”

“... and Indian, novel, Durgeshnandini. These writers, and others, were, to paraphrase what Pound once said about Tagore, singing India into existence. The Renaissance, by reconfiguring the Western and the local, was providing, for Indians, a reinterpretation of what it meant to be Indian. Tagore himself was born four years before Kipling; and if Kipling made a ...”

“... Frances Donaldson, modestly omitting to refer to her own worthy, if rather pedestrian biography of Edward VIII, could not contain her indignation. ‘Nor am I alone in thinking it rather shocking,’ she boomed, ‘that Mr Higham was able to find a reputable British publisher for his book.’ Lady Donaldson doesn’t believe for a moment that either the Duke ...”

“... good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third son, Henry was certainly Richard’s nearest male heir in 1399; but the seven-year-old Edmund, Earl of March, grandson of Philippa, the daughter of Edward III’s second son, Lionel, had through the female ...”

“... figure of them all, the Prince of Wales, who became Lewis’s personal friend. The future King Edward sought legal advice from him in connection with, among other embarrassments to the cherished image of royalty as the seat of virtue, the sticky Mordaunt divorce case, in which the Prince was forced to testify, and the Tranby Croft cheating-at-baccarat ...”

“... beliefs on listeners. ‘My work is addressed to all who believe – and also to all others,’ he said. It inspires awe and wonder rather than piety, and it is often playful. With the exception of his late opera Saint François d’Assise, there’s nothing obviously Catholic about it, if you leave aside the texts he wrote to accompany it; nor does it have ...”

“... it was largely won in scholars’ libraries, and it took years to get. The historical critic Edward Said has recently reflected of Eliot and the New Critics, now so widely reviled for conservatism and élitism, that in one respect at least they were populists when they began: they argued that you didn’t need scholarly or philological ...”

“... nose, and often both simultaneously. According to Lady Gregory’s diaries, Sir William had said to her during the Egyptian visit: ‘You and Wilfrid talk more nonsense than any two people settling the affairs of the world.’ In his diary Blunt wrote: ‘I have remodelled Lady Gregory’s 12 sonnets, which I heard from her a day or two ago she would ...”

“... was forced to set out to find a new career in spring 1540. And still no official statement had said that monasteries were bad things. The preamble to a second Act of Parliament in 1539 merely noted without much comment that there did not seem to be many monasteries around any more (I paraphrase), and that it was therefore important to confirm that the ...”

“... how little had been published by Lebanese about the conflicts they’d experienced. Lebanon, he said much later, was ‘an oral society’ which had failed to commit its history to paper. Little Mountain, set during the mid-1970s in the thick of civil war, was his signal that the time had come to keep a written record. Khoury returned to Beirut in 1973 and ...”

“... atheistic opinions, while the second reports the words of another man, Richard Cholmeley, who is said to have been converted, or ‘persuaded’, to atheism by Marlowe. I have spent rather longer than I might have wished puzzling over these documents and the circumstances of their composition. They are mere bits of thumb-stained paper but they have the ...”