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“... mother is said to have predicted, would be ‘a thorn in Charles’s side as long as he lives’. David Hume, encountering Fox at 16 during one of his formative visits to Paris, was startled by his intellectual power and maturity and already foresaw him as ‘a very great acquisition to the publick’, if the lure of a life of cosmopolitan ...”

“... the most powerful individuals and communities of his time: the cities of Athens and Sparta, the king of Macedon, the tyrant of Syracuse and the grandest Aeginetan aristocrats. The only artist who could compete with him was Pindar: sometimes both were commissioned to celebrate the same occasion for the same audience – we still have the rival scripts, but ...”

“... seemed to be whatever was happening in Elvis Presley’s eyes. It was Sylvia Plath’s poetry, David Bowie’s soulful space nonsense or the truths riding in on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s guitar feedback. But by the time Dead 2Pac appeared at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, deep had begun to signal something netherworldly. Those ...”

“... Jerusalem, had not woken in the night with a terrible thirst and sipped the water forbidden her by King Solomon, peeved by her refusal to sleep with him, and in his own palace, too. He had to make do with her slave girl, but stipulated that the Queen should take nothing from the palace or she would pay the penalty. She scoffed at the idea that he might have ...”

“... waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his bulk is translated into an image of monumentality and strength. The female pharaoh Hatshepsut was portrayed in sculpture as slender with delicate features. The discovery in 2007 of her long-lost mummy revealed that she was enormously fat. At the heart of ...”

“... plentiful verse translations, a long biography of Haig, a short and oddly memorable study of the King David of the Bible, and one novel, Operation Heartbreak, about a clandestine war operation in which a body, purporting to be that of a British officer carrying secret documents, was dumped off the coast of Spain to deceive the Germans. As a singleton ...”

“... wives would be too clumsy.’ Those ministers were let off wearing knee breeches when meeting the king, except MacDonald, who was ‘very dignified and distinguished in his Privy Counsellor’s full dress uniform’. When MacDonald died in 1937, Channon said he had been happy ‘only after 1931, when he had carted his old followers, and could breathe freely ...”

“... one of my feet or maybe even my neck.’ And there is Ditie, the picaresque hero of I Served the King of England, a waiter in a Prague hotel, who once served the Emperor of Ethiopia, and worked with a head waiter who once served the King of England. Ditie is usually wrong about everything – he marries a German athlete ...”

“... advise, when his time comes, that might undermine the process of The Hague? Quite a lot about the king-makers with their easygoing hands-across-the-sea approach to his ascendancy, and quite a lot about the time-servers – quite a lot, if he wants to air it, on Richard Holbrooke, Douglas Hurd, David Owen. On the UN, which ...”

“... Bunter’s to run headlong into things, with preposterously beneficial results for all concerned. David Hughes, in his latest novel, takes this trait and turns it on its head: the outcome of Bunter’s intervention in certain notable episodes of the 20th century is very serious indeed. By this account, Bunter is personally responsible for the arrest of ...”

“... more extreme. The charitable impulses of Dorchester’s citizens were, at the same time, stirred. David Underdown has discovered in Dorchester an outpouring of philanthropy on an extraordinary scale, unrivalled in England. Here was a town of only 2500 inhabitants which gave, in the fight for Christ against Antichrist, £150 for the defence of their ...”

“... has it, was brought to him mid-set). ‘At the peak of its popularity in the 16th century,’ David Berry writes in his history of tennis, ‘Paris alone had 250 courts, including one at the Louvre and another at Versailles, the latter of which was occupied in the revolution of 1789 by the Third Estate as a symbolic protest at the elitist nature of this ...”

“... from outside Parliament, continuing the practice of his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, who appointed David Cameron as foreign secretary last November, making him a peer in order to do so. Many find the practice of making outside appointments constitutionally suspect. However, the constitutional issue that requires rectification isn’t so much the way in which ...”

“... of the Principia Newton began to refashion himself as a public figure. When the provostship of King’s College fell vacant in 1689, he campaigned to get himself appointed, and was indignant when he failed. But he succeeded in getting elected as MP for Cambridge University, and soon developed a taste for politics and power. In 1696, he moved to London to ...”

“... born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, the year of the Comeback Special, the year that Martin Luther King Jr was murdered on a hotel balcony in the west of the city. Five foot two, green-eyed, a self-described ‘gypsy-spirited tyrannical pirate’ with a face that was equal parts Old Hollywood and Brancusi mask, Lisa Marie was famous for her relationships with ...”