“... least, the image of her husband – by her side for three reasons; first, he was already a titular king (of Sicily); second, as heir in his own right to the crown of Aragon, he had prospects of patronage and access to military clout; thirdly, and above all, he was the right sex. If one had to be a woman in the late Middle Ages, Spain was, relatively ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... seven months at the Press Lehmann made his first appearance as an editor when he commissioned Michael Roberts’s New Signatures (February 1932), which included contributions from Julian Bell, Richard Eberhart, William Empson, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender, William Plomer and Lehmann himself. Through Spender he met Christopher Isherwood. The friendship ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Liberal deputy first elected in 1919, failed to oppose the confidence vote on the new government. King Victor Emmanuel III had capitulated to the fascists, but Amendola had faith in Italy’s constitution and the strength of its democratic institutions. Like many other members of the liberal coalition that fell when Mussolini took power, Amendola hadn’t ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Rome and supplying them with cash.One of his jokes involved an escapee British general, Michael Gambier-Parry, who was renowned as a forger. O’Flaherty took him to Irish parties and introduced him to senior German officers as an Irish doctor. Gambier-Parry found safe lodgings with a group of nuns, the Blue Sisters.Another figure who aided those ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”