“... Dr McIntosh has said bluntly that it was ‘at no time’ a ‘typical English community’. Until James I started to listen to those who preached retrenchment, the Crown was an exceptionally undemanding landlord. The Crown’s inertia as a landlord is familiar, but Havering had the further peculiarity of being ancient demesne, which meant, among other ...”

“... in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by William Tyndale) and there are just two differences from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am determined’). But this version is from the Great Bible of 1539-40, ‘the Bible appointed to the use of the churches’, famous for its title-page showing Henry ...”

“... but it was Rachel who haunted the English literary imagination throughout the 19th century. In James’s The Tragic Muse, the Jewish Cockney actress Miriam Rooth claims to be in the same style as ‘that woman’, and George Eliot’s Gwendolen Harleth foolishly thinks of herself as destined for stardom because she is more beautiful than the ‘thin ...”

“... on the stage of history. In the works of turn-of-the-century ‘nationalist’ historians like James Ford Rhodes and Edward McMaster, the war – in which both sides fought for noble causes – was seen as a tragic disruption of the great national family and its most enduring legacy was the preservation and strengthening ...”

“... Party, two MI5 officers in particular had fallen under the spell of the imaginative CIA agent James Angleton. Angleton became convinced that Wilson was a Russian agent and he conveyed this certainty to Arthur Martin and Peter Wright. Arthur Martin took on board Angleton’s ‘certainty’ that Hugh Gaitskell, Wilson’s predecessor as leader of the ...”

“... them centred on his ownership of an uncontrollable Welsh corgi. The name of this dratted animal is Edward. Edward will respond to nothing but the stern tone in the voice of Muriel Pritchett, a scatty dog-trainer with artificially frizzy hair and a thrift-shop outfit. Thus, we have a couple of archetypal scene-stealers ...”

“... the ceremony Their plan was to use a Spanish honeymoon as cover for an assassination attempt on Edward VII, who was visiting Gibraltar, but MacBride instead got drunk in Algeciras. The editors describe this dereliction as ‘the final blow’ to Maud in a honeymoon ‘that from the start had not been auspicious’. In defence of MacBride. I suppose it might ...”

“... met the painter David, an Englishman who had befriended Charlotte Corday at her trial, and Charles James Fox – ‘rather lourd and maladroit’. With the help of a young American, Margaret and Katherine visited Tom Paine, ‘up half a dozen flights of stairs, in a remote part of the town’, and found him making models and playing with his two adopted ...”

“... with the experience of existing in divided and distinguished worlds. Hobhouse’s Helen, like James’s Isabel Archer, is perpetually an alien. But there are big differences from the James novel, the most obvious being that The Furies is narrated in the first person, and could not be told in any other way. There is no ...”

“... Claimant, and of the great day when he succeeded in putting down Oscar Wilde in conversation. James, as he was named at his birth in 1912, was impressed and remained influenced for the rest of his life by this elegantly remote and unfulfilled man. By the age of 16, when the family was living in the South of France, he had changed his first name to the ...”

“... could count major cultural figures among his friends – Mozart’s librettist Da Ponte and James Fenimore Cooper, for instance. Others he kept at a slight distance. Having done time with the notorious bore Hawthorne, he had the wit to remark: ‘Last night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said ...”

“... Cooke explains at the beginning, ‘follows the life of a London family through the reign of Edward VII. He was the big bearded monarch who had a notorious appetite for bed and bawd, but nevertheless was known as Edward the Peacemaker.’ Nearly forty years later, in January 2012, Emily Nussbaum reviewed the first US ...”

“... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and ...”

“... a hundred years earlier, so profound was the transformation between the reigns of Henry VIII and James I. Despite rampantly high mortality rates, the population quadrupled to around 200,000, blurring the boundary between the medieval cities of London and Westminster. By 1600, hideously overcrowded tenements, with dozens of families sharing the same ...”

“... James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubí; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond’s great work ...”