“... indirect commodity taxes on domestically-produced goods. Like some economic historians such as Peter Mathias and Patrick O’Brien, Brewer suggests that the taxes may well have been heavier in Britain than in many other European states, and may also have fallen disproportionately hard on the middling and lower classes, rather than the landed and rich. Plus ...”

“... presence of Spanish settlements and although James was trying to arrange a marriage between the Prince of Wales and the Infanta Maria. The extreme improbability of there being no conflict must have been clear to Ralegh, but perhaps he thought that a great deal of gold and an Indian rising that would make Guiana an English possession would compensate for a ...”

“... part of 18th-century European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns ...”

“... of great letter-writers. The most interesting are not the ones written to his brother from the Peter and Paul Fortress describing his mock-execution and pardon, about which he made little at the time, or the account he later gave his brother of his time in penal servitude. These things were all to be written up later by the novelist. Unlike ...”

“... lawyers to prevent the abuse of prisoners, but Akam reports that the divisional commander, General Peter Wall, refused to give this order to the forces under his command. He was later promoted to chief of the general staff.British behaviour in Basra inspired widespread hatred. Officers deceived themselves by talking of their good works, such as repainting ...”

“... to be an innate requirement of Christianity and took his stand on the loyalty to a Protestant prince and country which the pope forbade. It was not Catholicism itself against which Donne turned but its militant post-Reformation face, with its doctrinal aggression and its endorsement of the assassination of heretic kings. Here as in much else his thinking ...”

“... A few months before the publication of Dusklands in 1974, J.C. Kannemeyer reports, Peter Randall, the director of Ravan Press in Johannesburg, asked J.M. Coetzee to consider supplying ‘a few more personal details’ for the jacket of his first novel. ‘We are often criticised,’ Randall wrote, ‘for not telling readers about our authors ...”

“... na Mara (‘shieling of the sea’) in Kilpheder (from the Gaelic Cille-pheadair, or ‘church of Peter’). Ten square miles of machair stretch from the western dunes to the eastern rocky moors. This is a plain of shell-sand, where millions of cockles and whelks, razor-shells and buckies, ground into ivory fragments smaller than a baby’s fingernail, have ...”

“... water heater in transit to Dubai. In October 2015 Captagon made global headlines when the Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen was intercepted at Beirut airport with 32 shrink-wrapped boxes and eight leather suitcases containing two tons of top-grade pills, valued at £190 million. By this time rumours abounded on all sides in the Syrian war that Captagon was fuelling ...”

“... 1980s. Most striking is the ‘modernity of witchcraft’, a phrase coined by the anthropologist Peter Geschiere. Technology, science, prosperity and education do not necessarily inhibit the belief in witchcraft; they may actually propagate it, especially if accusing witches breaks with a colonial past and helps to realise national identity. South Africa’s ...”

“... from an owl (genitive glaukos) perched on a wine-store and bothered by a bee, that the young prince had accidentally drowned in a jar of honey. By watching snakes, Polyidus goes on to divine a way to bring the boy back to life, teaches him his mantic art, and then, as he is leaving Crete, unteaches him by getting him to spit into his mouth. The story of ...”

“... do.’ This sad tableau is one of a pair. She came to England the following year to star in The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. At the initial press conference one of the straps on her dress broke with suspiciously good timing, whereupon she announced that she would very much like to appear in a film adaptation of The Brothers ...”

“... author lets us know a little about each. Mountbatten may have had an affair with Barbara Cartland; Prince Michael of Kent worked for British intelligence; Duncan Sandys, on being asked if he was the ‘headless man’ being fellated by the Duchess of Argyll, replies, ‘Don’t worry, dear boy! There’s safety in numbers.’ Pincher holds the monarchy in ...”

“... seems to suffer from any narrowness in that regard, except, more than perhaps, in the writing of Prince Otto, a shoddy book written to complicate his reputation as the author of ‘stories for boys’. In a letter he described a character he was developing, Countess von Rosen, as ‘a jolly, elderly – how shall I say? – fuckstress’. Well, I suppose ...”

“... his novel set in 18th-century Naples. In Les Trois Femmes de ma vie the young Dominique listens to Peter Pears singing Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo in a booth at the HMV shop on Oxford Street, with a thrilled sense of eavesdropping on two levels of erotic complicity, not only between Michelangelo and his beloved but also between singer and ...”