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“... by Tristan that is taking the Irish princess Isolde, who is affianced to Tristan’s uncle, King Marke, to Cornwall. Preceding this journey was an earlier sea voyage, when Tristan, grievously wounded, had set off alone in a frail skiff for Ireland, in the hope of being ministered to by Isolde, renowned for her healing arts. Since the foe who wounded him ...”

“... send-off. He was, after all, the longest-serving capo of them all, a man who commanded respect. King Hussein of Jordan would have laughed to see his adversaries courting his son and heir, King Abdallah II. Spectators could almost hear Hafez al-Assad of Syria whispering into the young ...”

“... In 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin led 128 men in search of the final stretch of the Northwest Passage. When they failed to return from their expedition, a number of relief parties were sent out to find them. Over the next decade, naval commanders, traders and amateur sleuths collected objects and relics from the area: signs of what may have become of the lost men ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”

“... Jacobeans, while including a host of nonentities, such as Pomfret, Stepney, Dyer, Smith, Duke and King, was at the very least defective and misleading. The fault was not Dr Johnson’s. The guilty men, as a contemporary noted, were not ‘the illustrious scholar but his employers, who thought themselves … the best judges of vendible poetry’. Johnson’s ...”

“... laureate and historiographer royal was vital to him, as was his income as a shareholder in the king’s theatre company. Money was tight after the Theatre Royal burned down in 1672, and again in 1689, when he was sacked from his official posts because he was a Catholic: translating Virgil appealed to him not only for artistic reasons but as a source of ...”

“... dimensions to Balboa’s claim five years later. Being a Portuguese in the service of a Spanish king, Magellan had the meridian of hemispheres running through his soul: the Tordesillas line, which divided the world between Spain and Portugal in the West, would divide it again in the East. But Magellan’s idea of a South Sea, which he (probably) called the ...”

“... a dress made of newspapers’), she encounters Laurence Vail, an impoverished poet known as the ‘King of Bohemia’. Laurence wears clothes made of sailcloth and is the first man she has ever seen ‘without a hat’; he makes her dream of escaping to Paris and riding roughshod over the Guggenheim decorum:When I saw Laurence in Paris, I wanted to be wearing ...”

“... that British new music – equally suspicious of European modernism and anything American, whether John Cage or Janis Joplin – wasn’t a club worth joining. Although he had no desire to take up 12-tone composition techniques, Arnold Schoenberg’s music appealed to him intellectually and he engaged with it seriously – in noticeable contrast to Vaughan ...”

“... that good writing could be killed by poor delivery. Richards quotes a poem by the Elizabethan wit John Harington, complaining that someone had read his epigram with ‘point so perverse’ that in the end it seemed ‘neither witty nor a verse’.The formatting choices made by authors and printers are suggestive, but remain open to interpretation. In ...”

“... achieved by subordinating his feelings of ‘just gratitude’ towards Louis XIII. It was that king who had raised the memorialist’s father, his personal favourite for some ten years, to the rank of duke and peer, so we should not be wholly surprised to find Saint-Simon challenging conventional opinion by rating him higher as both person and ...”

“... the financial and administrative strains of Charles’s war policy exacerbated relations between King and Parliament during the first five years of his reign, thus demonstrating the disruptive effect of war on Early Modern society which has been elaborated by Michael Howard and other historians. Ashton doesn’t examine the implications of the change in ...”

“... In a recent TV programme about King George VI, Peregrine Worsthorne commended his late sovereign for being a dull man, brains being the last thing the British constitution requires of a monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull ...”

“... fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on anecdotes though not quite so strong on truth) recorded that he once got one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour up against a tree. She protested with ‘Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last as ...”

“... up with the petty feuds of office – which can be as contradictory as they are amusing. When Tom King came in as Secretary of State for Employment over Clark, the junior Minister bridled. He regarded his new master with contempt. This contempt continued until July 1989 when Clark read in the papers that King was to be ...”