“... from Cardiff, the valleys of South Wales being no stranger to hopefulness of that sort either. The King and Queen, with Princess Elizabeth, sailed out for the Coronation Naval Review in May 1937. Commander T. Woodroffe made a live radio broadcast from the event, which was much listened to, and much remembered, for relaying ...”

“... broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have her purpose of musicon by carryenge the powder about her’, apparently meaning it would attract some musician ...”

“... by a choir of Black children dressed as slaves, among them the ten-year-old Martin Luther King.O’Connor’s story ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’, published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1953, lampoons the première and the sentimental vision of Southern identity it represented. This is how it begins:General Sash was 104 years old. He lived with his ...”

“... but I enjoyed it. I thought I was too grand to do interviews, but then I was asked to interview Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on the set of some film. So I said, what the hell, I’ll do it. That initited the interviewing period of my life: I remember coming back and thinking. ‘It’s an absolute doddle, interviewing’ – I mean. ...”

“... far less detailed attention to motive and mental thought than, say, Pride and Prejudice allows Elizabeth Bennet. It is such attention that makes characters feel real, makes us feel that they are not the novelist’s characters but ours. Pushkin’s hero and heroine surely remain Pushkin’s at all times, as he is keen to remind us. They are like the ...”

“... its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting votes for the next year’s awards. Today it’s Call Me by Your Name, which has been much lauded, so much so that when we come to watch it this rather gets in ...”

“... then, that he cites in a footnote the ‘able revisionist analyses’ of the classicist Helen King, which irrefutably establish that this is not the case. Not only does the term ‘hysteria’ appear nowhere in Greek texts, but the various symptoms attributed to the migrations of the hustera – including respiratory discomfort, neck pain and blackening ...”

“... it was buried in the grounds of his Hampshire home – to mark the wedding of the young Princess Elizabeth. In this, he told future generations how the seeds of social destruction were being sown in his own time by the mass media and the spread of ‘the false, pernicious doctrine that “all men are equal”’, and urged his descendants to rebel against ...”

“... public discourse in general. As Cyndia Susan Clegg writes in her studies of press control under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts, censorship had always functioned via a range of regulations and mechanisms; it was a ‘crazy quilt’ of overlapping measures (proclamations, statutes, ordinances, prerogatives) emanating from, or enforced by, ‘a disarray of ...”

“... In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the ...”

“... and forty people went down with the Princess Alice, including the husband and two children of Elizabeth Stride. Her family gone, she took to drink, went on the streets. She became one of the victims of Jack the Ripper – the kind of ominous coincidence that fiction needs to avoid if it is to be plausible. Life itself can afford to be more extrovert. So ...”

“... the Calvinist international was often a matter of words or gestures, which cost rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists ...”

“... as their own sovereignty, the overlordship of the peoples of the Upper Nile, but also – and here Elizabeth Monroe was almost certainly right in her excellent little book on Britain’s Moment in the Middle East – because Egypt was sick and tired of compulsory partnerships, which as in this case would bring British troops back whenever there was any trouble ...”

“... From Rabat he writes of the ceremony that accompanied the Sultan of Morocco’s reception of King Feisal of Iraq: ‘though not (as you know) much in favour of Kings and Queens in general’, he mingles with the crowd, which was, ‘of course, a good deal more interesting than the royal procession’. One of the best passages describes Hodgkin’s epic ...”

“... themselves on the British imagination. One of these was the massacre at Kanpur, where the Maratha king Nana Sahib turned against a corps of about a thousand Europeans, laying siege to their cramped entrenchments. After a punishing fortnight under fire, and some 250 deaths, the British surrendered with a promise of safe passage to Allahabad. But as they pushed ...”