“... occurred on the same day as that of the Duke of Clarence, who, had he lived, would have become King of England. Normally the passing of the next heir to the throne would attract much public attention, but it was completely eclipsed by the death of the Cardinal. After the Requiem Mass, despite the poor visibility caused by a London pea-souper, vast crowds ...”

“... completed with the addition of Landseer’s lions. The first major Wellington statue was placed, King Kong-like, atop Decimus Burton’s arch on Constitution Hill in 1846, but was so derided that it was removed in 1883 and consigned to the rustic obscurity of Aldershot’s military scrubland. A second official monument to the Iron Duke had been in the making ...”

“... material of the novel, with the epigraphs for all its sections taken from the seventh edition of Charles Arnold-Baker’s Local Council Administration (2006). The election is important locally because of the disputed status of the Fields, a rundown area that is administratively shared with the encroaching city of Yarvil. The Fields represents the seething id ...”

“... ruler to react to this change of location was Henry IV, who in 1400 wrote a letter to the ‘King of Abyssinia, Prester John’. The fascination with Ethiopia did not stop there, for news broke, in 1441, that an Ethiopian delegation was to attend that year’s Council of Florence. The Pope was reportedly much moved, even though the delegation turned out ...”

“... VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to England, executed (by strangling before his body was burned) in October 1536. Daniell, like his hero, is an ...”

“... the author of many books, including a biography of his father, Lord Carnock, a bestselling life of King George V, a life of Mrs Charles Lindbergh’s father, some novels and some historical studies. Of these works I had read only one, the pseudo-autobiographical Some People, first published in 1927 (according to the ...”

“... history’: a detailed study of the ways in which tattered texts that had belonged to one writer, Charles Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which ...”

“... Like​ the knives of Chinese jugglers’, Charles Bataille said of his friend Félix Nadar, ‘turbulent, unexpected, terrifying’. Adam Begley’s biography describes a life lived so frenetically, it’s surprising it lasted so long – Nadar died at the age of ninety, in 1910. Yet he is remembered today primarily for the stillness and serenity of his photographic portraits of 19th-century Parisian luminaries ...”

“... Charles van Onselen is a South African historian teaching at the University of Witwatersrand who, from his earliest years, has been immersed in the realities of South Africa’s past and its present-day social and political problems. He was born in 1944, the son of a police detective and an Afrikaner mother of working-class stock ...”

“... Al Capone and a white-haired/eyebrowed/moustachioed, black-coated Supreme Court Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes. There’s Harpo again, this time with cotton-wool locks, alongside his brothers – Groucho’s moustache, glasses, cigar, wing-tipped head of hair, Chico’s sly open mouth and steel-wool hair identifying the ersatz Italian Jew. The three ...”

“... an event about which his circle was nervous. ‘Moran’ is a reference to his personal physician, Charles Moran, and Soames primly advises us: ‘A “Moran” was the name given by WSC to a special stimulant pill prescribed by Lord Moran for him to take before a major speech.’ Special stimulant pill? Soames offers no clue as to its chemical ...”

“... Court – this coffee house is adjacent to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and across the Charles River from the Business School. I did not take part in a political cabal, or think that one was being plotted around me, unless the normal conversation of Harvard elites counts as such. It did not occur to me that any of the discussions taking place might ...”

“... and greed is more disquietingly shown in an adventure story like ‘The Man who would be King’ than it is in Conrad’s anti-Imperialist fables, because Kipling is on the side of Empire, not safely against it. But at the end of ‘The Man who would be King’ an emblem of Empire, the crown of gold and turquoise ...”

“... Noting Jack Lindsay’s statement that Bunyan’s The Holy War, published in 1682 near the end of Charles II’s reign, is a commentary on ‘absolutism against the liberties of the people’, Greaves asserts that this view ‘cannot be sustained’, but doesn’t explain why. Yet Sharon Achinstein, a scholar he cites elsewhere, has convincingly argued that ...”

“... and southern Netherlands in the years between 1550 and 1672, from the dreadful spoliations of Charles V and Philip II to the deadly invasion of Louis XIV, a period comprising the Great Dutch Revolt, under the Princes of Orange and Nassau, the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) that resulted in the independent Dutch Republic, and the infamous Thirty Years War ...”