“... the Provençal poet, is pretty dull. The book which best deserves reprinting is The Strang Life of Charles Waterton (1782-1865), a biography of the recklessly eccentric naturalist and taxidermist, published in 1949. Here was a rumbustious, unaffected figure whom Aldington could admire without reservation. Squire Waterton had a perfect contempt for social ...”

“... In June 1939, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth visited Washington. Although the White House had had air-conditioning installed in its offices ten years earlier, family and guest rooms weren’t artificially cooled. Despite this, the King and Queen requested hot-water bottles, heavy-duty bedding and glasses of hot milk before bedtime ...”

“... bailed out by his father, he joined the rest of the group in the provinces. They were hired by Charles Dufresne, leader of a company attached to the household of the Duc d’Epernon at Agen. There were then a dozen or so such companies touring the provinces, many living from hand to mouth, and for the next 13 years, they played at venues mainly in the ...”

“... for a cabinet post, Rosina wrote to the prime minister, Lord Derby, denouncing the pair as ‘one King of Sodom and the other King of Gomorrah’. Terrified of what might emerge in a divorce hearing, Bulwer-Lytton consulted six doctors, all of whom agreed that Rosina was insane. He did nothing until June, when he was ...”

“... This was Coleridge’s harmless bird ‘that loved the man who shot him’; Baudelaire’s ‘king of the blue’ brought ‘stumbling and ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are ...”

“... is a chronological table to assist their memories. Speaking of Joan’s strange encounter with Charles VII at Chinon, where today the docile tourist follows his guide from mouldering tower to tower, she finds an ‘irrational element’ in history which ‘will always defy analysis’, an idea that would have been worth saying more about. Miss Warner is ...”

“... which confiscated a tenth of the annual value of the property of those who had supported the King. Some Major-Generals were harsher than others. Royalists breathed more easily under Major-General Whalley in the Midlands, where insurrection was held to be relatively unlikely and where Whalley had respectable local connections and was ready to mollify ...”

“... they possibly have in common, these wildly different figures, the nature boy and the urban genie?Charles Arthur Russell Jr was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in May 1951, and died in New York in April 1992 from complications related to Aids. His father, Chuck, a former naval officer, was the town mayor. It’s easy to picture something down-home and folksy, but the ...”

“... In this he differs from other thriller writers who have found in Florida the new face of crime. Charles Willeford, whose Detective Sergeant Hoke Moseley ‘looked a little better, he thought, with the blue-grey teeth and always put his dentures in before shaving’, never gets half so close to creating dreamboats. Hiaasen’s use of fancy ...”

“... etymology.Heads fascinated Gauguin. The show includes a fantasia centred on a decapitated Tahitian king, and Gauguin Heads might have provided a more coherent title and remit than Gauguin Portraits. A portrait is, after all, attached to a definite identity. It’s true that you come across odd items at the National Gallery that fit this description: a ...”

“... Bernini felt to be beneath him. To bother with them personally, he explained, would be like the King of France giving an audience to a poor widow over a matter of a few pence. He did claim, on the other hand, of his bust of Charles I, that he had taken ‘as much care for the packing as studye in making of itt’. He was ...”

“... Revolution broke out, Priestley’s Birmingham laboratory was torn down by patriotic Church and King mobs and eventually he fled to exile in America. Davy’s previous employer, the chemist and physician Thomas Beddoes, had also been confined to the margins of his profession because of his support for the French Revolution. Davy’s address to the Royal ...”

“... late 1950s to the famous torture trial of 1967. These operations were restored to topicality after Charles Richardson’s escape from prison in May 1980 and his subsequent letter to the Times. The first question which needs to be asked is whether such books should be written at all. And if they are written, should any serious notice be taken of them? The ...”

“... he considered priest-ridden and decadent, and for its spectacularly dysfunctional ruling family (King Carlos IV was mentally unstable; real power lay with the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, Queen Maria Luisa’s lover; the heir to the throne Fernando plotted against them all). In May 1808, Napoleon summoned the king and his ...”

“... is misleading: in fact dinosaurs are neither reptiles nor lizards (nor, inevitably, terrible). Charles Knight, who painted them for the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago from the turn of the century, divided the ‘schizosaur’ into type A, the bipedal carnivore or saurischian (‘lizard ...”