“... tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or Blakemore), a successful silk-weaver in ...”

“... he was given a knighthood and the OM; he was swept up into the arms of the Establishment; even Edward VII recognised a good tune when he heard one. By 1911, Elgar was one of the most famous men in the land: the hoped-for glory had come. But in 1920, Alice died, and Elgar the composer died with her. As the last verse of ‘The Music ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) indicates that many scholars, herbicide to hand, regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to ...”

“... Alan of Galloway, with his two hundred ships, was the great warrior of the 13th century, Edward I, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, by contrast a buffoon who built his castles in the wrong place as the result of a failure to understand sea-power. Bannockburn and Edward II get a fair hearing for a book on naval ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”