“... him: Gordon Brown wouldn’t be the only disappointed person were Tony Blair to be succeeded by Michael Howard. Caracalla was succeeded by Macrinus, a co-conspirator of Martialis, the man who did the actual stabbing and was shortly afterwards caught and impaled. Macrinus, thoroughly incompetent, was dead within 14 months, to be replaced by Heliogabalus, a ...”

“... for example, has recently been enjoying An Englishman in Paris: l’éducation continentale by Michael Sadler (Simon and Schuster, £10). On 14 April Charles wrote Sadler a letter, duly circulated a few weeks later by his publishers (I don’t think it’s a hoax). To make sense of it, it’s useful to know that Sadler’s book opens with a description of ...”

“... Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of well-known writers, and it’s ...”

“... but all that seems to happen in this line is that the agent, Richard Strickland, played by Michael Shannon with fabulously nasty relish, tortures him with a cattle prod – and loses two fingers in the process. The creature is referred to as ‘the asset’, indeed ‘the most sensitive asset’ the facility has entertained, but this is wishful ...”

“... these years, Karl Abraham, was sober and methodical. ‘Prussianity,’ Freud once wrote to Ernest Jones in his charming, near-perfect English, ‘is very strong with Abraham.’ He could not have said the same of Ferenczi. There were storm signals almost from the beginning, however. Early in their friendship, Freud briefly analysed Ferenczi, and Ferenczi ...”

“... sharp scepticism about the benefits of manipulating DNA that forms the moral core of the novel by Michael Crichton on which it is based. In the novel, Ian Malcolm, the conscience of the tale, remarks as he lies dying from a raptor attack (in the film he doesn’t die; only villains die on Spielberg’s screen): ‘Science, like other outmoded systems, is ...”

“... the preceding period between the acting of his first drama and the year 1800.’ Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her brilliant, scholarly and concise Portraits of Shakespeare (Bodleian, £14.99), deals with two of the images ‘taken from life’ that duly emerged. One, known as the Flower portrait, was bequeathed to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1895, by which ...”

“... Alec Guinness. And what about Intolerable Cruelty (2003), with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which doesn’t look like a Coen Brothers movie because it doesn’t look as if it was directed by anybody? Still, they can’t be after a single perfect film, since their best work falls into such distinct modes: quirky film noir (Blood Simple, The Man ...”

“... of the European war. In I Confess, the war appears to suggest a reason why Clift’s character, Michael Logan, should become a Roman Catholic priest. The war had made these characters, giving them confidence, troubling them with memories. So it was perhaps that the 1950s were the decade of neurosis. For all their resistance to the ‘torn T-shirt ...”

“... British intelligence. ‘Danny Boy’ is the call-sign of Smith’s superior in London, played by Michael Hordern. One of the most puzzling things about the movie is why the man allocating the code names would choose to call himself ‘Danny Boy’ (I’m reminded of Steve Buscemi’s character in Reservoir Dogs, complaining about his nom de heist being ‘Mr ...”

“... data from which the object was discovered were obtained’, as one of its discoverers, Michael Brown, carefully puts it – in the second half of October 2003 (the 21st fortnight of the year; U is the 21st letter of the alphabet). Brown and his colleagues, Chad Trujillo and David Rabinowitz, have submitted a name to the International Astronomical ...”

“... the substantial electoral significance of Ukip is to decoy voters away from the Tories and lure Michael Howard’s party towards the right, not only weakening the support of an already enfeebled opposition but handing the centre ground to Labour. Perhaps this is what Farage means when he says he’s worried by Kilroy-Silk’s ‘left-wing’ agenda. Tony ...”

“... Europe as the result of military defeat, something the Windsors were lucky to avoid.Heather Jones’s book​ places George in the broader historiography of European monarchy to explain the way the pressures of the First World War remade his dynasty. Although keen to establish the king as a player in wartime decision-making, most notably when he was ...”

“... were warm, gentle, determined people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend Valerie Storie and then shooting her, leaving her for dead before driving off in the couple’s car. Among the guests at the wake were Jean Justice, who told me he was a (rather elderly) law ...”

“... is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A Royal Duty (Michael Joseph, £17.99), a book at once agonisingly boring and shamefully fascinating. Much the most interesting bits are the insights into such things as what the Queen has (or used to have) for breakfast: ‘one slice of granary toast, a smear of butter and a ...”