“... Ottawa hostess’ with a house in Ottawa and a summer home next to that of Premier Mackenzie King. She graduated to the company of the rogues and rascals from a life typified by lunch with Mrs Barrington Ward, wife of the Times editor (Mrs Ward ‘in a dark reddish dress with fully pleated collar, looking what the word charming means’), a world tour as ...”

“... he’s getting down might be nonsense. During her time at the National Beryl appeared opposite Michael Gough in the world premiere of Edward Albee’s Counting the Ways. It was a strange choice to open the vast new complex with – a small play. In the course of it, the performers are required to throw off impersonation and improvise briefly as ...”

“... in distressed companies and undervalued shares (one of Wilbur Ross’s nicknames is ‘the King of Bankruptcy’). The shares are: £260 million W.L. Ross, £50 million Virgin Money, £50 million Abu Dhabi investment fund. You’d be forgiven for noticing that those numbers don’t come close to £747 million, so where’s the rest of the ...”

“... Indian soldiers won the Victoria Cross. Many letters make the point that their loyalty was to the King personally, and express great contempt for the German Emperor, although it may well be that these are sentiments picked up from a prevailing climate of British opinion. The 127th Baluchis, whose trenches were only a few yards away from the German lines, took ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... which is not the scene of de la Mare’s engrossing stanza: Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’? The old king to the sparrow. Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’? Rust to the harrow. It is solid stuff: the more we repeat it the more true facts emerge. The old king’s words are at once a threat, a gibe and an ironical comment ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... of London (who did not). In what remains the best and most moving book on Elgar yet written, Michael Kennedy provided the first psychologically-plausible portrait, of an anguished and lonely man who became a music-maker, a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams. And more recently, Michael De-la-Noy has depicted Elgar ...”

“... Castle, a plain inscription remembering him as ‘Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Councillor to King James, and Friend to Sir Philip Sidney’. Greville’s life of Sidney, written in the earlier part of James’s reign, is a study in failure. ‘He never was magistrate, nor possessed of any fit stage for eminence to act upon.’ For ‘want of clear ...”

“... great British stability, and infused by a changing but always recognisable British identity. When Michael Powell in A Canterbury Tale had shown a hawk rising from a pilgrim’s hand and turning into a Spitfire, it had seemed natural. When English Electric developed the RAF’s new jet interceptor, the Lightning – tested by Roly Beamont – it had seemed to ...”

“... forcible removal of a belt might imply, is unclear. But his companion on the mission, the Athenian king Theseus, certainly either rapes or elopes with Hippolyta’s sister, Antiope, and takes her back to Athens as his wife. (In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare, following a minor variant of the myth reported by Plutarch, calls her Hippolyta, not ...”

“... his father was a courageous man who died in a duel. By the 1960s, as he rose through the ranks of King Idris’s army, other stories were doing the rounds. We flash back to a brutal, impromptu interview with an NCO, who informs him that he was fathered by an Allied pilot, a Corsican brought down over the desert by the Germans in 1941. Gaddafi assaults his ...”

“... and studiously avoids political controversy. The book expands on a pair of articles (written with Michael Levi) in Foreign Affairs, which argued that recent fluctuations in the price of oil marked the end of a period of relative stability that began in the late 1970s. The first piece ran in 2011, when the yearly average price of Brent crude exceeded $100 for ...”

“... The Four Hundred (its distinctive symbol is a gold sovereign) and Harry Patterson’s To Catch a King (this title and its distinctive symbol are still to burst upon us from, once again, Hutchinson). The authors of these commercially outstanding novels have much in common professionally. All are British tax exiles. Forsyth lives in Southern Ireland; Sheppard ...”

“... bones might be deep in Forest Lawn, but the audience expects and will pay for his presence. Michael Jackson Live? It’s a no-brainer, securing the singer a kind of higher existence – a freedom from quibbling reality – that the real Jackson tried to have all his life but could only dream of in a terrifying series of Neverlands.Dead 2Pac appeared at ...”