“... being in the mouths of so many: the Earl of Bothwell abused her body at his pleasure, having passage in at the back door.’ Mary’s enemies, the Confederate Lords, also issued a ballad, accusing Mary and Bothwell of the ‘beastly buggery Sodom has not seen’.Mary was not a fanatic; unlike her uncles or her namesake in the South, she had no interest ...”

“... in Byron’s letters to his undoubtedly homosexual (code word ‘methodiste’) Cambridge friend Charles Skinner Matthews. When, writing from Falmouth before setting out on his Mediterranean tour of 1809-10, Byron talks of being ‘surrounded by Hyacinths’, Marchand duly explains that Hyacinth was a youth beloved by Apollo and that, as used by Byron, it ...”

“... homosexuality was, if not quite in the open, certainly accepted. Hambleton’s regulars included Charles Scott Moncrieff, who introduced Coward to Oscar Wilde’s lover Robbie Ross, through whom he met Siegfried Sassoon. But Coward wasn’t a bohemian or part of any set that could even retrospectively be seen as countercultural. He absorbed many of the ...”

“... affection’ for the Bourbon monarchy: he later confessed to weeping at the sight of Charles X being forced out of Versailles. But professional ambition led him to swear an oath of allegiance to the new constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. When asked to choose a side, Tocqueville, not for the last time, preferred to maintain an ...”

“... Attendance rose. The Empire, on Leicester Square’s north side, was reopened in 1989 by Prince Charles, while the cinema named after him, on Leicester Place, opened in its current incarnation in 1991, offering tickets for £1. Cinemas were built at Staples Corner, the junction where Edgware Road meets the North Circular and the M1 (six screens, 1991); in ...”

“... ends, it suits them. The new Higher Education Act was given royal assent just nine days after the passage of the Public Order Act, which eviscerates the right to peaceful protest in the UK – just in time to empower the Metropolitan Police to arrest six members of the anti-monarchy group Republic on the morning of the coronation, with little outcry from the ...”

“... a rather disappointing sight, even when viewed through a telescope. The great Parisian astronomer Charles Messier described it as ‘a very feeble light, evenly spread out around the … nucleus’. Sometimes its tail was visible, sometimes not. Often it seems to have looked like a very small luminous cloud, or just a blurry shape in the sky. But we don’t ...”

“... of the group. In August 1876, when he was 21, he wrote to William Ward about their contemporary Charles Todd, later chaplain to the Royal Navy: ‘In our friend Todd’s ethical barometer, at what height is his moral quicksilver? Last night I strolled into the theatre about ten o’clock and to my surprise saw Todd and young Ward the quire boy in a private ...”

“... the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages’. The context of this passage is a harebrained scheme to freeze sound by the Frigicom process, using liquid nitrogen, so that noise pollution can be frozen at source and disposed of safely at sea. These books have safely been turned into sound without Frigicom technology, in audio ...”

“... in literary judgments of Irish writers; but the phrase Hill uses suggests he is also remembering a passage in the marvellous introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse where Yeats is describing the rebellious poets of his youth who wanted to kick over Victorian moralism: they thought of poetry, he says, as ‘a tradition like religion and liable to ...”

“... on the shutter and it is thrown open, light floods in, there is the sudden roar of the crowd. Charles I steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on ...”

“... in Virginia in 1873, and moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska when she was nine years old. Her parents, Charles and Jennie, gave her an attic room of her own and the freedom to mix with the local population, many of whom contributed to her education and would appear later in her fiction. She was the eldest of seven children; it seems she was closer to her two ...”

“... But it was not a press case in the narrow sense. The crux o Justice Brennan’s opinion is in a passage noting that, under our law, officials are broadly immune from libel actions for what they say in the course of their duties, the purpose being to encourage vigour in their performance. ‘Analogous considerations,’ Justice Brennan said, ‘support the ...”

“... There have been over-confirmed stories, legends left by his peers: the terrifyingly effortless passage through exams and scholarships, the steady ascent of a career curve that would shame a Widmerpool. A Horatio Alger parable that lifted him from a single-parent home in the shadows of Wormwood Scrubs to a Mellon Fellowship at Yale, and the literary ...”

“... life. A feud between sisters? Isn’t that … female? We know about the tragic loss of her son, Charles, at the age of eleven, which means that she exists for us in grief, as a permanent mother. There is nothing so diminishing, to the canonical view, though anyone who has witnessed this sort of loss first-hand knows that it puts you among the Greeks, into ...”