“... 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 ...”

“... an enduring (quasi-)Marxist current in British gay activism, represented by both Jeffrey Weeks and Peter Tatchell, has viewed ‘homosexuals’ as an oppressed class, like the proletariat, produced, along with housewives, by a historically contingent bourgeois sexual system which emerged alongside modern capitalism/consumerism in the 19th century. Its focus is ...”

“... of past racial prejudice and homophobia are more vinegar than acid, and when they have power, they peter out. There’s a strong passage in the third season when an executive for Lucky Strike cigarettes, Sterling Cooper’s biggest client, tries to get Sal to have sex with him in the agency film room. When Sal refuses, the executive tells the agency, without ...”

“... Donald Trump and his followers are not at all racist. But Robinson goes the extra mile. He’s a prince of violent talk who opposes violence when it touches the dispenser of his political privilege. ‘Some folks need killing,’ he said in a sermon on 30 June at the Lake Church in Bladen County. But from the podium in Milwaukee he thanked his God and ...”

“... truth, it seems both to Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley (‘Puss’), and to her biographer, Peter Conradi, that it did so here. In their view Murdoch’s advancing illness, crumbling away language and reason, laid bare in her an essential impulse toward love. As words broke up, it was the vocabulary of love and delight that survived the longest. When ...”

“... nor, it must be said, was Welles. Spike sets aside his campaign against blood sports to attend Prince Charles’s wedding, while Orson gloats when Princess Margaret in her eagerness to see him cuts Peter Sellers. But are the rest of us any better? Perhaps the spate of books about, say, the Mitford family is also a ...”

“... of Fenton’s best poems, such as ‘Dead Soldiers’, an extraordinary account of lunching with Prince Norodom in Cambodia, are to high-class war and travel journalism what brandy is to wine or calvados to cider. Well, here are your facts, obscure, exotic, detailed, packaged in the artfullest words – what more do you want? One can only reply that their ...”

“... preparations been more painstaking than in the run-up to the great demonstration at St Peter’s Fields on 16 August 1819. The crowds assembled to hear Orator Hunt speak about reform have been variously estimated at between 35,000 and 150,000. Manchester magistrates had plenty of experience in dealing roughly with large protests by desperate ...”

“... all the way up to Newfoundland, anywhere which was not already occupied by ‘any Christian prince or people’ (no look-in for Native Americans, of course). This arrogation was all the more sweeping because back in England the pattern of land ownership was still very varied. John Darby’s huge estate map of Smallburgh, Norfolk, dated a year before ...”

“... between his legs. Buyers were delighted – Theseus and Pirithous went to the wealthy collector Prince Nikolai Yusupov for six thousand francs – but the critics were frosty. ‘Austere men are shocked by the kind of studies which all this knowledge suggests to them,’ Jean-Baptiste Boutard wrote in 1806. One might hope, he said, that ‘Madame ...”

“... monopoly’. States, of which there were many in early modern Italy, disagreed about whether each prince should have total control over the communications services in his territory. The alternative was that couriers of other powers should be allowed to operate within the state’s frontiers. In places such as Ancona and Rimini, handover points for mail ...”