“... Some years ago, during an American Presidential election, rumours began to circulate that Senator Edward Kennedy was again thinking of running for the Democratic nomination. A young reporter had the idea of asking ex-President Nixon for his views on this development. ‘If Teddy Kennedy is serious,’ Nixon is alleged to have replied, ‘then the first thing he should do is lose thirty pounds ...”

“... the question could be suitably slanted, subtly and artlessly presented. For others on the ship had said, and presumably written too, that Eleanor had spent whole nights of the voyage dancing in the ballroom while her husband lay dying. She was left with three sons, the youngest of whom seemed to have inherited the Tennysonian ‘black blood’ and was confined ...”

“... her refusal to support vaccination against smallpox. Writing about vaccination in India, she said she didn’t ‘much care’ about it – ‘the greatest authorities in England believe that the diminution of smallpox has resulted more from sanitation than from vaccination.’ She was certainly correct in thinking that in England the decline of smallpox ...”

“... and theory as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’, and defined with appropriate terminality by Edward Said in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’:Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness ...”

“... Uluç Ali and Hasan Veneziano – both important 16th-century corsairs, both converts – were said to have quarrelled bitterly over a boy; one Western spy claimed Ali was ‘very much given to the unspeakable vice, taking pleasure in more than three hundred pageboys’. The habit of sodomy was often supposed to have been acquired from ...”

“... North are in monochrome pen and wash. The soft, sooty depths of the mezzotints after Reynolds by Edward Fisher and Edward Okey, the sharp unambiguous lines of Luke Sullivan’s etching after Hogarth’s The March to Finchley and the delicate precision of the Sandby drawings are not put in the shade as they might be were ...”

“... and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about strikes and lock-outs, arbitration, penal codes, and indeed all ...”

“... back heroism to English Protestantism after some unfortunate hiccups during and after the reign of Edward VI. Mary spent her early years as the centre of attention, the heir apparent to the English throne. In 1525, at the age of nine, she was sent off to be the figurehead of Cardinal Wolsey’s revived experiment in government, the Council in the Marches. The ...”

“... overshadowed its writing. That such talent just happened to gather in a New York City apartment is said to stand as a testament to the burgeoning power of the gay story itself, bursting to be told. It’s been twenty years since that early wave of gay fiction appeared – classics such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, George Whitmore’s ...”

“... at the tail end. The second generation were born in the decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont and Max Gluckman (1911). They were formed in the age of Hitler and Stalin, and, in the cases of France and Britain, of impending imperial decline. The last generation ...”

“... squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor Square, in the relative safety of Mayfair, where in 1781 Henry Thrale, the brewer, was the only resident businessman. Brewing had always enjoyed a certain respectability. The South Sea Company might have collapsed, but the Turkey ...”

“... at all. Such might have been the gloomy midcareer appraisal of His Royal Highness Prince Albert Edward, later (and briefly) King Edward VII. And it is not coincidental that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For ...”

“... the new year, as the gruesome saga of the Emperor’s coma continued, we heard that the journalist Edward Behr had just finished a BBC documentary which promised, with exquisite timing, to blow the lid off the ‘Hirohito myth’. Behr had apparently discovered some incriminating evidence which historians had hitherto either missed or wilfully ignored. One ...”

“... The dead writers,’ Eliot said, ‘are that which we know.’ They are also, Peter Ackroyd might want to add, that which we don’t know we know or wish we knew better, agents of prodigious but incomplete hauntings. From The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to Chatterton, Ackroyd has shown himself an adept in the speech of such ghosts ...”

“... up at Tichborne House begging for cash and, when asked whether he had ever heard of the Bella, said he had heard that the crew ended up in Australia. A few years later, Henriette placed advertisements in newspapers all over the world. In due course, a bankrupt butcher in Wagga Wagga, originally called Arthur Orton though at the time going by the name of ...”