“... of a young man for something he had never really known,’ McCarthy remarks. It might equally be said that Byrd created an English Catholic musical future which failed to come into existence; English Catholics wouldn’t have the public presence or the resources needed to use his work for another three centuries (and even then not many of them did). Byrd ...”

“... the unmarried mother, the prostitute’ became enfranchised in his narratives. Cobb, it was said, put the pimp into the Scarlet Pimpernel. In applying his gifts as a historian to his own past he became an exceptional memoirist. In A Sense of Place (1975), he recalled the first time he stayed in Paris, aged 18, in 1935: The flat shook regularly with the ...”

“... did she dislike him intensely but she had recorded in considerable detail a passionate affair with Edward Lane, the doctor at whose cure house, Moor Park in Surrey, she had been receiving treatment. The case hinged on whether or not she had made up the affair. A keen reader of novels, she had indeed invented a romance in the vein of Madame Bovary, which had ...”

“... first of the Age of Reason, he was the last of the magicians’.There’s something to be said for this opinion. In her history of English alchemy, Jennifer Rampling pays relatively little attention to Newton, perhaps because he’s an over-ploughed furrow, but does quote a startling passage from folio 13r of MS Keynes 22, an early Elizabethan ...”

“... shepherd of men as it is a barefoot goddess of Greek mythology. ‘I have come,’ she once said, ‘to bring about a great renaissance of religion through the dance, to bring the knowledge of the beauty and holiness of the human body through its expression of movements.’ Thus spake Isadora. We have no more than four seconds of Duncan dancing because ...”

“... was to have made Donnie Brasco but for domestic reasons couldn’t leave Los Angeles. When I said I knew nothing of the Mafia, they said nobody did except, possibly, ‘your friend Marty’. I had known nothing of the 18th century or indeed of Pakistanis, but Hanif Kureishi had ...”

“... case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt. Tennant spent ...”

“... all is well.’ Mrs Bennett scarcely carries conviction when she contends that the ostentation of Edward VII’s court appalled Margot, who found it, her biographer claims, ‘alien to the climate of the times, which was one of industrial deprivation and unemployment’. Too much inclined to take Margot’s effusions at face value, the author tends to echo ...”

“... where he was born, but it was an excuse to play with a new archive. I found him straight away. Edward Reginald Hill was just where I expected him to be, in Eltham, South London, an only child living with his parents. It was a bigger household than I had realised. His maternal grandfather and great-grandmother were living with them, but the address was more ...”

“... the other way, as Hutton indicated in Witches, Druids and King Arthur (2003). The same could be said about King Arthur as about druids. On the one hand we have the ‘historical King Arthur’, about whom we know effectively nothing – not even whether such a person existed, for there is no contemporary evidence for him at all, and the closest approaches ...”

“... Savile Row façade was festooned to celebrate the state visit of Napoleon III and the wedding of Edward VII, both Poole men. In The Suit, Christopher Breward writes of the tailor’s ‘crucial ritual’ of measuring the client, a practice he believes has been overlooked because of its ‘intensely personal nature’. ‘Customers seem not to have patience ...”

“... into the sea as far as a horse could stand, or where a man could reach with a long pole; others said it was ‘so far into the seas as they could from the shore discern a Humberkin’ – apparently a kind of floating barrel. But the Admiralty judge Sir Henry Marten complained in 1637 that this was ‘an old idle saying, no man living being able to tell us ...”

“... stamped on instead. Few favourites lasted a reign, let alone a regime change. As Sir Henry Wotton said, ‘the state of a favourite is at the best but a tenant-at-will.’ Favourites could find themselves out of favour, they could overreach or be pulled down by envy. That astute observer of Stuart monarchs, John Milton, has his Satan describe Adam as God’s ...”

“... relates to Ernie Bevin’s working-class way with aspirates. We must set up an ad hoc committee, said Bevin at some international meeting, and the delegate from an important fish-producing country insisted that he himself must obviously be a member of any such committee. And – as befits a man who has been at the centre of great events in stirring times ...”

“... clearly defined. Riggs touches on it briefly in connection with Jonson, to whom Shakespeare is said to have administered a ‘purge that made him bewray his credit’ (i.e. ‘beshit’ himself, as Riggs glosses). Duncan Salkeld gives a lively account of the brief and pungent career of George Wilkins, a little-read author who combined literature with a ...”