“... was born in Torquay in 1867. His father was a blue-blooded spendthrift and crony of the Prince of Wales, who died young of alcohol and consumption when Fawcett was 17, and is chiefly remembered as a brilliant batsman for Cambridge University and Sussex. Fawcett too was a fine cricketer, following his father in that, though diametrically opposed to ...”

“... system led not only to unnecessary delay but also to unsatisfactory compromises.In Cabinet (1986) Peter Hennessy records that, under Mrs Thatcher, ‘cabinet does meet less frequently, it discusses fewer formal papers, it is presented with more virtual faits accomplis at the last moment, and she does prefer to work in ad hoc groups – many of the most ...”

“... Governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw sees her first ghost, that of the wicked valet Peter Quint, the words she uses to describe the event – which initially persuades her that her ‘imagination’ has ‘turned real’, in the person of her handsome employer – are words in which Hamlet is remembered. ‘It was plump, one afternoon, in the ...”

“... a secular one, and represents nothing more than the religious yearning of a non-religious age. Peter Ackroyd’s dignified, often eloquent biography offers a picture of More which is a combination of Catholic admiration and scholarly determinism. Ackroyd has soaked himself in late medieval history; happily, he does not pretend to conduct a historical ...”

“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... Jewish merchants of Baghdad. Siegfried’s great-great-grandfather Sasson Ben Saleh was the last Prince of the Captivity at the Caliph’s court, and before moving to England the family had been the leading merchants in Bombay, where their great charitable monuments still stand. But Siegfried’s father, Alfred, had been disowned by his mother when he ...”

“... Empson’s summer absence at the School of Letters in Bloomington, Indiana. The student producer, Peter Cheeseman (now Director of the New Victoria Theatre, North Staffordshire), together with the stage manager Alan Curtis, bulked up Empson’s spare and insufficiently dramatic verse with ‘alchemical mumbo-jumbo’; the composer Gilbert Kennedy ensured the ...”

“... Casanova Girls, which featured an interview with a 21-year-old woman who had had 789 lovers. ‘Prince Philip, Mary Whitehouse, Lord Hailsham and Brigid Brophy were all quoted on what they thought about the subject.’ The only sex-related subject not permitted in the paper was homosexuality. Murdoch was against it: ‘Do you really think the readers are ...”

“... passed for a depressed, incurably indolent member of some royal household (there was a look of Prince Theodoric) in hopeless exile.’ Turns up again in 1939 running the Bellevue where Uncle Giles dies, Dr Trelawney gives trouble and General Conyers proposes spending a second honeymoon. Gone forth in his cerements, according to Mrs Erdleigh, by 1944. No ...”

“... of his Sunday Mirror story telling how the future Princess of Wales was supposed to have met Prince Charles secretly in the royal train in a country siding. It was denied outright by Buckingham Palace, but the editor refused to retract. Jokingly, or perhaps not, he suggests this may have cost him a knighthood. If an editor can be knighted for editing ...”

“... or did they favour the Tate because it had been founded at the initiative of another merchant prince, Sir Henry Tate? And why were the gestures of the Duveens so rarely imitated before the new Turner Wing of the Tate, the Clore Gallery, opened in 1987? Spalding is remarkably candid, if often crisp, in her survey of recent developments. These include the ...”

“... order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol Reed and Peter Ustinov had been likewise commandeered, and the little group were told to produce a film to boost the British troops’ flagging morale. It was made, then aborted as subversive by the War Office; enough influential people had liked it, however, to ensure ...”

“... six weeks, his first completed play, The Silver Box. It was a notable success in the theatre, the Prince and Princess of Wales attending the final performance; and it was soon being staged in Germany and Russia. Within a year or two Galsworthy’s name was linked with those of Shaw and Granville-Barker and he was being regarded as a shining light of the ...”

“... historian departs from the actual world, he or she cannot wander like Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince unrestrained among infinite possibilities. As Hawthorn emphasises, counter-factuals that are too inclusive do not help test causal hypotheses. Not all worlds that are conceivable in what we might call hypo-space have equally privileged subjunctive ...”