“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cartoonists often call him) burst out of exile and raised an army. She reports, via Princess Elizabeth, to the British royal family, using, lest the letters be intercepted, a code that would have delighted Murasaki since it consists of calling the personages of the royal family by such names as Magnolia and Honey Suckle. She notes that in France it is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a showroom on Fifth Avenue and sending a set of dinnerware as a prenuptial gift for Princess Elizabeth. Tupperware was presented to King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the Maharaja of Ender, and in 1948 the Tupper ‘Millionaire Line’ of houseware won a major award from the journal Plastics World. But the reputation of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Edward VI. The standard of living to which they then grew accustomed became a heavy burden under Elizabeth, whose favours to the family were intermittent and grudging. From the late 16th century to the late 17th – from the time of Sir Philip Sidney to that of his great-nephew the republican Algernon Sidney – there runs a current of failure and ...”

“... Morrison ... was Secretary of State to the Lord Monjoy, our chief Governour, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,’ says Sheridan, so he ‘had the best oportunity, of knowing the State of this Nation at that time’. An Irish rebellion led by ringleaders of English extraction, a pattern which seems to have remained consistent in Irish history to the time of ...”

“... school friends would make him uneasy, in case they ‘remembered the words that I said the day the King was beheaded’. Scholarships took him to Cambridge, where he might have been expected to prepare for the law or the church, but he doesn’t seem to have pursued any particular career. Illness may have checked his ambition: bladder stones left him in a ...”