“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... racial degeneration. Luckily the hearties don’t have it all their own way. Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s book describes how, at the same time as Stan Cullis was assembling his Wolves team, Matt Busby at Manchester United was embarking on a managerial career uniquely committed to attractive attacking football. The triumph’n tragedy saga of United ...”

“... accepted Boeing’s tender for a massive new cargo aircraft for the United States Air Force, David Lodge would not have been able to write Paradise News. Instead, however, Lockheed got the contract, and Boeing were left with a redundant set of blueprints for the biggest furniture van never built. To save all that development money going to waste, they ...”

“... over trenches, barbed-wire and shell-torn territory to kill and capture large numbers of Germans. David Omissi remarks on the accuracy with which Jemadar Shah Mirza (a jemadar was a junior NCO) describes the action and its short-term consequences for the enemy; as usual no general breakthrough was achieved. Letters of this date and from these regiments are ...”

“... at once. Perhaps it’s just the best we can do. Perhaps we should have stuck to philosophy.Caspar David Friedrich is a possible exception. Born in 1774 in Greifswald on the Baltic coast, he studied painting in Copenhagen and in 1798 moved to Dresden, the so-called or self-styled ‘Florence on the Elbe’, where he died in 1840. A major retrospective of his ...”

“... park, is a definition ‘governed by the idea of privilege – the privilege granted by the king to his wildlife to live in freedom and safety within the afforested areas of his kingdom’. This defence of privilege and, by implication, of royal hunting makes for profoundly uncomfortable reading if one comes to it with a gut abhorrence of blood-sports ...”

“... College, the site of his earlier joke about the horse that goes round and round the statue of King Billy on College Green. Apart from its obvious use as an image of political paralysis, the obsessive circular motion refers us back to Ferguson again, who wrote an essay ‘On the Ceremonial Turn, Called Desiul’. This is the Irish word ...”

“... symphony: but nothing significant emerged. Honours continued to cascade: the Mastership of the King’s Musick, two more knighthoods and a baronetcy (although not the sought-after peerage). But now they were consolation for the loss of creative power, rather than recognition of its continued potency. In London, Elgar shuffled from club to club, but he ...”