“... in ‘want of well pronouncing shibboleth’. Rochester, perhaps, would have agreed with Lord Peter Wimsey (another post-war figure) that ‘a principle has no claim to be called a principle until it’s killed someone.’ In the end, Rochester may have become a prisoner of his own disbeliefs. Much of what he wrote may appear to have no discernible ...”

“... and pavement script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on Back’ – appeared to float unabashed on a sea of London scrawls. For a few days after the explosions, the atmosphere was bad on the buses. Passengers were looking into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from ...”

“... rhetorical style is modelled on the Rat Pack’s favourite comedian, another Don – Rickles, the king of insults. He’s been pretty good at it: ‘Little Marco Rubio’, ‘Low Energy Jeb Bush’, ‘Birdbrain Nikki Haley’ doomed them in the primaries. But Kamala Harris had him flummoxed. He tried recycling some of the old Hillary Clinton epithets ...”

“... a monarch who has bankrupted the nation in his relentless pursuit of cunt? Why art thou poor, O king? Embezzling cunt That wide-mouthed, greedy monster, that has done it. Or are they a sly celebration of the priapic feats of a man who, in a somewhat over-enthusiastic endorsement of Filmer’s royalist theories in Patriarcha, seemed intent on making himself ...”

“... many key works missing from the Tate’s show) makes an allusion to Rembrandt’s Bathsheba with King David’s Letter. While it is true that Hopper may have been inspired by this painting, he clearly borrowed the precise pose and composition from an illustration by Jean-Louis Forain in a 1908 issue of Les Maîtres humoristes that he brought back from Paris ...”

“... On www.visitBritain.co.uk, ‘Gay London’ is promoted, somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian McKellen’. Houlbrook expresses this confidence when he asserts that, contrary to historical and popular orthodoxy, the postwar witch hunt of homosexual men never really happened. For decades, scholars have ...”

“... where he found a new type of analyst who advised him to do exactly what he wanted. He met Peter Orlovsky and they exchanged lovers’ eternal vows. He gave up his girlfriend and his job, started taking heavier doses of Peyote and began to trust the messianic stirrings in his soul. ‘The only poetic tradition is the voice out of the burning bush. The ...”

“... like a Syrian. Having escaped from his worm-eaten cell, Melampous went on to cure the king’s impotence, ‘having learned’ from a vulture, a long-necked, hook-beaked bird, that when he was a boy the king’s father had threatened him with a gelding knife now embedded in the bark of a certain tree. Having ...”

“... a habit of playing politics when he shouldn’t was the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. Throughout the financial crisis, Brown believed that King went beyond his remit in permitting his political views – particularly what Brown calls ‘his personal attitude to debt’ – to interfere with his policy ...”

“... series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually left the king blind. He was fascinated by the stage, and in the 1780s became drama critic for the Morning Post. He cultivated the friendship of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to ...”

“... up his sleeve. This was an illusion he encouraged, and there was some pleasure in sharing it. Peter Conrad’s Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life does not treat the actual life of Welles or its salient circumstances: his collaborations with John Houseman and Joseph Cotten and Michéal Mac Liammóir; his affairs with Dolores Del Rio and Lena Horne, and ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... It has all become too ugly, too personal. Weather can no longer be mentioned in polite society. As Peter Redgrove points out in his provocative study, The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense, we are ‘so violently affected by weather change ... that it can easily become a clinical problem’. Redgrove confesses himself a ‘Jekyll and Hyde to the weather’. He ...”

“... gold, from where he calls money-loving lawyers to join him as they pass. Poor Tom’s ravings in King Lear mention Nero as ‘an angler in the Lake of Darkness’. In Greek the letters of Nero’s name came to 1005, which happened to be the same total as the letters of ‘murdered his own mother’. It was for this crime above all that he was known to later ...”

“... for him. He was to marry his first cousin, Victoria, a few months his senior, and as de facto king of England he would work for the creation of a united Germany under Prussia. Studious, intelligent and good-natured, Albert put his shoulder to the dynastic wheel. By the age of 16 he was writing an essay on German national character. Victoria ...”