“... her or leave her: she is what she is. And she is powerful. Flanking her are her four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Henrietta and Anne. She would marry two of them off to dukes, and two of them to earls. And when the time came, she would net as partners for her seven granddaughters five dukes, an earl and a viscount. As for her husband and son, she would ...”

“... of The Madness of George III to be printed. Nick Hytner has the good idea of fetching the King back from Kew to Westminster to prove to the MPs that he has recovered from his madness. Of course, it never happened, and had he suggested this departure from the facts at the outset, I’d probably have demurred on grounds of historical accuracy. But the ...”

“... in the world of the medical quacks: James Graham, for example, offered his ‘celestial bed’, a king-sized arena of sexual delight, to voluptuaries (so said his enemies) or to infertile couples (so said he, not a little disingenuously). The steep price of bliss kept the bed out of wide circulation. Sexual knowledge in the Enlightenment is, within its ...”

“... Himself.’ Chesterton saw a banner hanging between two tenement houses: ‘God Bless Christ the King,’ it said. From then on an authoritarian Church and a fragile, insecure State combined to produce a sort of dark ages. It was as though Ireland north and south vied with each other over who could produce the most sectarian state. Censorship, mass ...”

“... He maintains that the first modern act of political terrorism in the region was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Irgun Zvi Leumi under the leadership of Menachem Begin; the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident, and Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, by Jewish extremists long preceded that of Anwar Sadat by their Muslim ...”

“... Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 24, MDCCXCV and Attributed to Shakspeare, Queen Elizabeth, and Henry Earl of Southampton (1796) is the prosecution case Malone was born to present, and he relishes every one of the 424 pages he takes up in doing so. (‘If he does not overpower his adversaries,’ complained a dashed but still defiant ...”

“... record already has a title, ‘He Who Makes the Sky Grey’, but no release date is in sight. The king’s son has high hopes for the recording. He recently called a press conference in order to claim that the project ‘intends to bridge the gap between East and West’. Meanwhile, Jackson is in the habit of smiling widely beside his new friend. Things are ...”

“... Barry as a woman ‘who, coming from the lowest ranks of society, passed through the palace of a king, before ending on the scaffold, where her sad end makes us forgive the scandalous thrill of her life.’ Some might find the sexual politics of that sentence a little iffy, the more so when Le Brun has over the last decades been rediscovered – or at least ...”

“... thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the one, or to the animation and variety that she ...”

“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain the ...”

“... trading, Taverner argues, remained remarkably unchanged in its essentials from the last days of Elizabeth I to the outbreak of the First World War: ‘street sellers came from a similar swathe of the working poor, trod the streets with similar tools and tactics, and played a similarly vital role in the city’s food supply.’ But as hawkers performed the ...”

“... target for quantitative analysis as early as 1930, when J.P. Oakden (with the ‘assistance’ of Elizabeth Innes – much of the hard graft of early computational work in English literature was done by women) attempted to calculate the frequency of various forms of alliteration across a raft of Middle English poetry. Oakden found that 63.7 per cent of ...”

“... Nothing was worth saving, and Wisner began to build a new network. Then, on 23 August 1944, King Michael of Romania ended his alliance with Germany.Wisner was ordered to Bucharest to ‘establish the intentions of the Soviet Union regarding Romania’. An advance party of nine agents had been sent ahead of him, including Beverly Bowie, who achieved the ...”

“... Alice, ‘without pictures or conversation?’Once upon a time there was …        ‘A King!’ my little readers will say at once.        No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.All children, except one, grow up.All children grow up: those who write for children need, therefore, to write fiction that will ...”

“... trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about industrial Manchester, begins with the disappearance of Mary’s aunt Esther, who has fallen in love with an army officer and become pregnant by him. When the officer disappears and their daughter falls ill, Esther stops ...”