“... Ball anchored the HMS Supply in Plymouth. It seems the ship was misnamed – supplies had been short on its latest voyage, and the crew had eaten some of the kangaroos they were carrying. Three unappetising ones survived, two of which were presented to George III. Here and there an animal exacted a paltry revenge. In 1768, two men were leading a bear up ...”

“... in the armed forces. And he was an enthusiastic collector of Abstract Expressionism, a friend of Philip Guston, and a correspondent of Robert Motherwell. He had already bought Hartigan’s August Harvest, which she had painted in Long Island the previous summer. He was interesting, and interested. He knew Hartigan’s world, but was not of it. He needed as ...”

“... in two distinctive ways. Her narrative starts with one foreign fleet in the English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were presaged by the spilling ...”

“... autobiography’ but says it’s OK to think of the book as ‘a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours’. That seems right. Sometimes there are invisible scare quotes, self-ironising or self-protective, around ‘Martin Amis’. At other times he seems to be addressing the reader in his own person. There’s no easy way of ...”

“... in her desire not to offend. The Queen Mother is lovable, the Queen is firm but warm underneath, Philip is wise and manly, Charles is the best of fraternal chums. Charlotte M. Yonge could not invent a nicer family than these Windsors. Brayfield, not to put too fine a point on it, is just as terrified as anyone else by the horsewhip and the punitive libel ...”

“... of its unconstitutionality but from Jacobite treason. By the same token, his Lord Chief Justice, Philip Hardwicke, was more concerned to link a crime wave in the 1730s with ‘the degeneracy of the present times, fruitful in the inventions of wickedness’, than with widespread human want and desperation. And there is an almost comical petulance in one ...”

“... was sacred. He admitted that he now had to wrestle with the notion of sacredness which, a short time before, he would have brusquely dismissed. Literature was necessary, he argued, but we should not call it sacred lest we ‘become what we oppose’. Ten months after this lecture was published Rushdie was meeting the Islamic scholars and affirming the ...”

“... about Papal finances in the middle of the 17th century, than Krautheimer can accommodate in one short chapter. Some of what needs to be said has in fact been said in a recent doctoral thesis on ‘Popes, Prelates and Bureaucrats’ by Pieter Rietbergen of the University of Nijmegen. The section which Rietbergen devotes to Alexander, Bernini and the ...”

“... Europe’s other most senior Catholic, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, or with Charles’s son Philip II of Spain. Pierluigi Farnese, the eldest son of one pope during this time, was widely accused of raping a 24-year-old bishop, hastening the unfortunate young man’s death (Farnese was later murdered by subordinates of Charles V), while another Holy ...”

“... from 1554 depicts Mary in the throes of this phantom pregnancy, shortly after her marriage to Philip II. The queen is shown seated rather than standing, in the tradition of portraits of Habsburg brides, and the partlet concealing her shoulders and neck follows the conservative fashion of contemporary Spain. She is 37. What’s striking is her ...”

“... from the Houston Post asked the bestselling author of the low-life and hilarious ‘adult’ short-story collection Someone like You who his favourite British writer was, he answered loftily: ‘Henry Green.’ Treglown thought the reason might have been that Dahl (who anyway loved a put-down) shared a friend with Green, the painter Matthew Smith, whose ...”

“... was only a movie. The Philadelphia Story was written specifically for and partly about her by Philip Barry. It had a two-year run on Broadway, and (since Howard Hughes had bought her the rights) she starred in the film version for MGM. Quite apart from the life it portrayed, for a time The Philadelphia Story was her life. Many scripts were written with ...”

“... had irresistible appeal. Linking the Biblical story of the baptism of the Ethiopian by Philip the Evangelist (Acts 8.27-40) with such texts as ‘Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God’ (Psalm 68.31), they marked out an alternative tradition to the one which condemned them, as sons of Ham, to be perpetual ‘servants of ...”

“... demons, often in obscure psychic concert with another man, dead or alive. Maxim kills Rebecca, Philip kills his cousin Rachel by an act of omission, and Julius, true to his overwrought foreign nature, wastes four women in all. These examples are taken from the novels, but the short stories, some very warped indeed, are ...”

“... of economic policy remind one alarmingly of the relationship between Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden in 1931: between a Prime Minister who senses that there is probably a better alternative but who lacks the authority or self-confidence to choose it and a Chancellor of formidable personality who is a rigidly orthodox practitioner of ‘this ...”