“... 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 ...”

“... it is not being allowed to recognise that you are disillusioned. (As Winnicott once said, it doesn’t matter what a child feels provided they are allowed to feel it.) There is a lie at the heart of democracy if the state will sacrifice its citizens’ freedom to take dissent to the limit, and indeed its relationship to them, for the sake of its ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... This has been an exceptionally serious debate,’ said Denis Healey on Wednesday 16 April, in contributing to the principal occasion on which the House of Commons gave its mind to the American air strike on Tripoli and Ben Ghazi, two days before, and to the Prime Minister’s decision – with the minimum of Cabinet consultation – to play the part of an ally by sanctioning the use for that purpose of bases in Britain ...”