“... and a vicarious stay at one of his most cherished hotels – the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port au Prince, Haiti. Since he has been so generous and direct with us, he might at least have let us in on a further secret – one of the tricks of the trade, so to speak. He might have explained to us, confidentially, that fiction is a machine for taking away ...”

“... young Russians, however, what matters is that if you compare their photographs, Shostakovich and Harry Potter are practically the same person. ‘It’s not Harry Potter, it’s the composer Dmitry Dmitrievich Shostakovich,’ a Russian website proclaims, featuring a photograph of the young Shostakovich with round ...”

“... Magdalen murder, and how it had been decided not to call the police in for fear of scandal. How Harry Weldon, leader of the more progressive fellows, turned down every single Etonian applicant for entry on meritocratic grounds and how the Etonians already up at the college demonstrated in the quad against Weldon, ‘the Red Dean’. How Weldon had worsted ...”

“... in 1502, greatly increasing the temptations for Suffolk and his value to his foreign backers, and Prince Edmund was already dead, so Henry, now aged 45, had just one ten-year-old son left; the queen became pregnant, and hope revived, but a few months later, she died too, and the king, who had lost someone who was clearly much more to him than a political ...”

“... like a dead fish oozing ‘its fluid genital trash’ – which is why he is worth reading at all. Harry Smart, in his second book of poems, Shoah, wants to see very large things – like the Holocaust, or the fate of contemporary Germany – and so writes a verse of regal vacancy, elevated but unstocked. His verse moves in an expensive chamber of concerns ...”

“... from 1927 to 1930, or in other words between the ages of six and nine. He was then made Crown Prince and Grand Voivode of Alba Julia, before becoming sovereign again between 1940 and 1947. He now lives in Switzerland. He has several daughters, among them Princess Maria, whose address is listed as that of her husband, the ‘financial analyst’ Casimir ...”

“... art thou That counterfeits the person of a king?’ ‘The King himself.’ To this extent, Prince Hal’s profligacy can be read as the son throwing the father’s imposture back in his face. The Donmar production wasn’t ‘giving the lie’ to the idea that this is a masculine play, as one reviewer suggested, or shifting the emphasis to the ...”

“... had given them a raw deal. He was the toast of the racecourse and the music halls. The diminutive Harry Relph began his career in blackface, as ‘Young Tichborne, the Claimant’s Bootlace’, soon to be abbreviated and immortalised as Little Tich, whence ‘tich’ and ‘tichy’ – a delicious way to remember the gargantuan Claimant. Those who took a ...”

“... at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. He outlived his popular, capable son, Edward the Black Prince, so it was as the prince’s heir that Richard became king. Given his youth, normal procedure would have been to establish a regency. But the obvious candidate, Gaunt, was too unpopular with the Commons to be named ...”

“... much more complicated character who, charged by the Lord Chief Justice with having led astray the Prince of Wales, answers: ‘The young Prince hath misled me. I am the Fellow with the great belly, and he my Dogge.’ No one now quite follows this joke, which may be an airy reference (to distract attention) to the Man in ...”

“... out badly but that ‘Bertie’ should have turned out so well. (There were two more brothers, ‘Harry’ of Gloucester and George of Kent, whose capacity for kingship, had the succession moved further down the line, was for different reasons equally doubtful.) Despite the horrors and humiliations of his upbringing as the second son of a father perversely ...”

“... As we wait​ with bated breath for Prince Harry’s memoirs, we might take a moment to consider the royal adverbs. In the days of Lilibet I, the favourites were, in no particular order, ‘jollily’, ‘spiffingly’, ‘thrillingly’ and ‘boringly’. It’s not yet clear how involved Lilibet II will be in palace matters but, under the influence of her mother and her yoga instructor, the preferred adverbs are likely to be ‘honestly’, ‘amazingly’, ‘insanely’ and ‘unbelievably ...”

“... they stand. Their nation, of whose actuality they seem to possess only the frailest knowledge: Prince Charles, already well into middle age, was surprised to learn from a bibliomane that Charing Cross Road had once been the centre of the London book trade. He is constantly bemused by farmers using pesticides.What they do feel they know is that their ...”

“... Service and went early to university, where he quickly established himself as a comic genius. Harry Thompson has written a serious and carefully researched biography, and his early pages can be read in perfect silence. Suddenly, however, as it reaches the early Sixties, the narrative is interspersed with indented passages of Peter Cook’s jokes. They ...”

“... a pincher looked after the village pound, where stray animals awaited their owners’ claim. Harry was – is – his first name and the name he goes by everywhere outside the printed page. The Express editor Arthur Christiansen didn’t fancy ‘Harry Pincher’ as a byline because it was nowhere near pompous ...”